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THROUGH NATURE 
TO GOD 



BY 



JOHN FISKE 



Soyez coniTne Voiseau pose pour un instant 

Sur des rameaux trop/reles, 
Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant^ 

Sachant qu'il a des ailes ! 

Victor Hugo 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1899 



X 



^ 



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asiioo 



COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN FISKE 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



( 



■>i.-' ViVV'. 



\. 



APR 10 1819 






TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY 
OF MY FRIEND 

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED 



PREFACE 




SINGLE purpose runs throughout 
this little book, though different 
aspects of it are treated in the 
three several parts. The first part, "The 
Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The 
Idea of God," was designed to supply some 
considerations which for the sake of con- 
ciseness had been omitted from that book. 
Its close kinship with the second part, 
"The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self- 
Sacrifice," will be at once apparent to the 
reader. 

That second part is, with a few slight 
changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration de- 
livered by me at Harvard University, in 
June, 1895. Its original title was "Ethics 
in the Cosmic Process," and its form of 
statement was partly determined by the 
fact that it was intended as a reply to 



vi Preface 

Huxley's famous Romanes lecture deliv- 
ered at the University of Oxford in 1893. 
Readers of '' The Destiny of Man '' will 
observe that I have here repeated a portion 
^ of the argument of that book. The detec- 
tion of the part played by the lengthening 
of infancy in the genesis of the human race 
is my own especial contribution to the Doc- 
trine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel 
somewhat uncertain as to how far that sub- 
ject is generally understood, and how far a 
brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore 
seemed best to recapitulate the argument 
while indicating its bearing upon the ethics 
of the Cosmic Process. 

I can never cease to regret that Huxley 
should have passed away without seeing 
my argument and giving me the benefit of 
his comments. The subject is one of a 
kind which we loved to discuss on quiet 
Sunday evenings at his fireside in London, 
many years ago. I have observed on Hux- 
ley's part, not only in the Romanes lecture, 
but also in the charming *' Prolegomena,'' 



Preface vii 

written in 1894, a tendency to use the 
phrase " cosmic process " in a restricted 
sense as equivalent to "natural selection/' 
and doubtless if due allowance were made 
for that circumstance, the appearance of 
antagonism between us would be greatly 
diminished. In our many talks, however, 
I always felt that, along with abundant 
general sympathy, there was a discernible 
difference in mental attitude. Upon the 
proposition that " the foundation of moral- 
ity is to . . . give up pretending to believe 
that for which there is no evidence,'' we 
were heartily agreed. But I often found 
myself more strongly inclined than my dear 
friend to ask the Tennysonian question : — 

" Who forged that other influence, 
That heat of inward evidence, 
By which he doubts against the sense ? " 

In the third part of the present little 
book, "The Everlasting Reality of Reli- 
gion," my aim is to show that "that other 
influence," that inward conviction, the crav- 
ing for a final cause, the theistic assump- 



via Preface 

tion, is itself one of the master facts of the 
universe, and as much entitled to respect 
as any fact in physical nature can possibly 
be. The argument flashed upon me about 
ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spen- 
cer's controversy with Frederic Harrison 
concerning the nature and reality of reli- 
gion. Because Spencer derived historically 
the greater part of the modern belief in an 
Unseen World from the savage's primeval 
world of dreams and ghosts, some of his 
critics maintained that logical consistency 
required him to dismiss thr mc -n belief 
as utterly false; otherwise d be 

guilty of seeking to evolve truth from false- 
hood. By no means, replied Spencer : 
*' Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the 
religious consciousness is the final devel- 
opment of a consciousness which at the 
outset contained a germ of truth obscured 
by multitudinous errors." This suggestion' 
has borne fruit in the third part of the 
present volume, where I have introduced a 
wholly new line of argument to show that 



Preface ix 

the Doctrine of Evolution, properly under- 
stood, does not leave the scales equally- 
balanced between Materialism and Theism, 
but irredeemably discredits the former, 
while it places the latter upon a firmer 
foundation than it has ever before occupied. 
My reference to the French materialism 
of the eighteenth century, in its contrast 
with the theism of Voltaire, is intended to 
point the stronger contrast between the 
feeble survivals of that materialism in our 
time and the unshakable theism which is in 
"he Doctrine of Evolution, 
'iralist like Haeckel assures 
: .'jnists we are bound to 
j:Lc\^ chat death ends all, it is a great 
mistake to hold the Doctrine of Evolution 
responsible for such a statement. Haeck- 
el's opinion was never reached through a 
scientific study of evolution ; it is nothing 
but an echo from the French speculation 
of the eighteenth century. Such a writer 
as La Mettrie proceeded upon the assump- 
tion that no belief concerning anything in 



X Preface 

the heavens above, or the earth beneath, 
or the waters under the earth, is worthy 
of serious consideration unless it can be 
demonstrated by the methods employed in 
physical science. Such a mental attitude 
was natural enough at a time when the 
mediaeval theory of the world was falling 
into discredit, while astronomy and physics 
were winning brilliant victories through the 
use of new methods. It was an attitude 
likely to endure so long as the old-fashioned 
fragmentary and piecemeal habits of study- 
ing nature were persis and tn:,. 
change did not come un •'•" ■^^'i 
of the nineteenth century. 

The encyclopaedic attair ;'': 
ander von Humboldt, for example, left him, 
to all intents and purposes, a materialist of 
the eighteenth century. But shortly before 
the death of that great German scholar, 
there appeared the English book which her- 
alded a complete reversal of the attitude of 
science. The " Principles of Psychology,'* 
pubhshed in 1855 by Herbert Spencer, was 



Preface xi 

the first application of the theory of evolu- 
tion on a grand scale. Taken in connection 
with the discoveries of natural selection, of 
spectrum analysis, and of the mechanical 
equivalence between molar and molecular 
motions, it led the way to that sublime con- 
ception of the Unity of Nature by which 
the minds of scientific thinkers are now 
coming to be dominated. The attitude of 
mind which expressed itself in a great ency- 
clopaedic book without any pervading prin- 
ciple of unity, like Humboldt's "Kosmos,'' 
is now become what the Germans call em 
iLeberwundener Standpzmkt, or something 
that we have passed by and left behind. 

When we have once thoroughly grasped 
the monotheistic conception of the universe 
as an organic whole, animated by the om- 
nipresent spirit of God, we have forever 
taken leave of that materialism to which 
the universe was merely an endless multi- 
tude of phenomena. We begin to catch 
glimpses of the meaning and dramatic pur- 
pose of things ; at all events we rest as- 



^w 



xii Preface 

sured that there really is such a meaning. 
Though the history of our lives, and of all 
life upon our planet, as written down by 
the unswerving finger of Nature, may ex- 
hibit all events and their final purpose in 
unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited 
vision the several fragments of the record, 
like the leaves of the Cumaean sibyl, caught 
by the fitful breezes of circumstance and 
whirled wantonly hither and thither, lie in 
such intricate confusion that no ingenuity 
can enable us wholly to decipher the legend. 
But could we attain to a knowledge com- 
mensurate with the reality — could we 
penetrate the hidden depths where, accord- 
ing to Dante {Paradiso, xxxiii. 85), the 
story of Nature, no longer scattered in tru- 
ant leaves, is bound with divine love in a 
mystic volume, we should find therein no 
traces of hazard or incongruity. From 
man's origin we gather hints of his destiny, 
and the study of evolution leads our thoughts 
through Nature to God. 
Cambridge, March 2, 1899. 



CONTENTS 



The Mystery of Evil 

I. The Serpen fs Promise to the IVoman . ^ 

II. The Pilgrim's Burden .... 8 

III. Manichceism and Calvinism . . • /^ 

IV. The Dramatic Unity of Nature . . 22 
V. IVhat Conscious Life is made of . • -27 

VI. JVithout the Element of Antagonism there 
could he no Consciousness, and therefore 

no World ^^ 

VII. A Word of Caution . . . .40 

VIII. The Hermit and the Angel , , . 4^ 
IX. Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brute- 
hood ....... 48 

X. The Relativity of Evil .... 5^ 

The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self- 

Sacrifice 

I. The Summer Field, and what it tells us . ^g 

II. Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 65 



xiv Contents 

III. Caliban's Philosophy . . . . y2 
IV. Can it he thai the Cosmic Process has no 

Relation to Moral Ends ? . . * 74 
V. First Stages in the Genesis of Man . 80 
VI. The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man . 86 
VII. The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened In- 
fancy ,....,. 88 
VIII. Some of its Effects . , , , p6 
IX. Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments . 102 
X. The Cosmic Process exists purely for the 

Sake of Moral Ends . . . . log 

XI. Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism . iiy 

XII. The Omnipresent Ethical Trend . . 727 

The Everlasting Reality of Religion 
I. '' Deo er exit Voltaire'' . . . > '33 
II. The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of 

God i4y 

III. JVeakness of Materialism . . .752 

IV. Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Hu- 

man God . . . . . .163 

V. Religion's Second Postulate : the undying 

Human Soul ...... 168 

VI. Religion's Third Postulate : the Ethical Sig- 
nificance of the Unseen World . . 777 
VII. Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or 

an Eternal Reality } . . . • ^7^ 



Contents xv 

VIII. The Fundamental Aspect of Life . . lyy 
IX. How the Evolution of Senses expands the 

World 182 

X. Nature^s Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting 

Reality of Religion . . . ,186 



THE MYSTERY OF EVIL 



I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, 
and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil. I the 
Lord do all these things. — Isaiah, xlv. 6, 7. 

Did not our God bring all this evil upon us ? — Nehemiah, 
xiii. 18. 

OvK €0(.K€ 5' T) (f)vaLq e7ret<7o5iw5i7? ot5(Ta ck rdv <f)aLvoix€V(tJv, uianep 
fjLoxOripa TpayuiSCa. — Aristotle, Metaphysica^ xiii. 3. 



The Serpenfs Promise to the Woman 

" Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, know- 
ing good and evil." Genesis iii. 5, 



HE legend in which the serpent is 
represented as giving this counsel 
to the mother of mankind occurs 
at the beginning of the Pentateuch in the 
form which that collection of writings as- 
sumed after the return of the Jews from 
the captivity at Babylon, and there is good 
reason for believing that it was first placed 
there at that time. Allusions to Eden in 
the Old Testament literature are extremely 
scarce,^ and the story of Eve's temptation 
first assumes prominence in the writings 
of St. Paul. The marks of Zoroastrian 
thought in it have often been pointed out. 
This garden of Eden is a true Persian para- 



1 Isaiah li. 3 ; Joel ii. 3 ; Ezekiel xxviii. 13, xxxi. 8, 9. 



4 The Mystery of Evil 

dise, situated somewhere in that remote 
wonderland of Aryana Vaejo to which all 
Iranian tradition is so fond of pointing 
back. The wily serpent is a genuine Par- 
see serpent, and the spirit which animates 
him is that of the malicious and tricksome 
Ahriman, who takes delight in going about 
after the good creator Crmuzd and spoiling 
his handiwork. He is not yet identified 
with the terrible Satan, the accusing angel 
who finds out men's evil thoughts and deeds. 
He is simply a mischief-maker, and the 
punishment meted out to him for his mis- 
chief reminds one of many a curious pas- 
sage in the beast epos of primitive peoples. 
As in the stories which tell why the mole 
is blind or why the fox has a bushy tail, the 
serpent's conduct is made to account for 
some of his peculiar attributes. As a pun- 
ishment he is made to crawl upon his belly, 
and be forever an object of especial dread 
and loathing to all the children of Eve. 

What, then, is the crime for which the 
serpent Ahriman thus makes bitter expia- 



77?^ Mystery of Evil 5 

tion ? In what way has he spoiled Or- 
muzd's last and most wonderful creation ? 
He has introduced the sense of sin : the 
man and the woman are afraid, and hide 
themselves from their Lord whom they 
have offended. Yet he has been not alto- 
gether a deceiving serpent. In one respect 
he had spoken prctfound truth. The man 
and the woman have become as gods. In 
the Hebrew story Jehovah says, " Behold 
the man is become as one of us ; " that is 
to say, one of the Elohim or heavenly host, 
who know the good and the evil. Man has 
apparently become a creature against whom 
precautions need to be taken. It is hinted 
that by eating of the other tree and acquir- 
ing immortal life he would achieve some 
result not in accordance with Jehovah's 
will, yet which it would then be too late to 
prevent. Accordingly, any such proceed- 
ings are forestalled by driving the man and 
woman from the garden, and placing senti- 
nels there with a fiery sword which turns 
hither and thither to warn off all who would 



">v 



6 The Mystery of Evil 

tread the path that leads to the tree of Hfe. 
The anthropomorphism of the story is as 
vivid as in those Homeric scenes in which 
gods and men contend with one another in 
battle. It is plainly indicated that Jeho- 
vah's wrath is kindled at man's presump- 
tion in meddling with what belongs only to 
the Elohim ; man is punished for his arro- 
gance in the same spirit as when, later on, 
he gives his daughters in marriage to the 
sons of the Elohim and brings on a deluge, 
or when he strives to build a tower that 
will reach to heaven and is visited with a 
confusion of tongues. So here in Eden he 
has come to know too much, and Ahriman's 
heinous crime has consisted in helping him 
to this interdicted knowledge. 

The serpent's promise to the woman was 
worthy of the wisest and most astute of 
animals. But with yet greater subtlety he 
might have declared. Except ye acquire 
the knowledge of good and evil, ye cannot 
come to be as gods ; divine life can never 
be yours. Throughout the Christian world 



The Mystery of Evil y 

this legend of the lost paradise has figured 
as the story of the Fall of Man ; and nat- 
urally, because of the theological use of it 
made by St. Paul, who first lifted the story 
into prominence in illustrating his theory 
of Christ as the second Adam : since by 
man came death into the world, by man 
came also the resurrection from death and 
from sin. That there is truth of the most 
vital sort in the Pauline theory is unde- 
niable ; but there are many things that will 
bear looking at from opposite points of 
view, for aspects of truth are often to be 
found on both sides of the shield, and there 
is a sense in which we may regard the loss 
of paradise as in itself the beginning of the 
Rise of Man. For this, indeed, we have 
already found some justification in the 
legend itself. It is in no spirit of paradox 
that I make this suggestion. The more pa- 
tiently one scrutinizes the processes whereby 
things have come to be what they are, the 
more deeply is one impressed with its pro- 
found significance. 



II 




77?^ Pilgrim's Burden 

UT before I can properly elucidate 
this view, and make clear what is 
meant by connecting the loss of 
innocence with the beginning of the Rise of 
Man, it is necessary to bestow a few words 
upon a well-worn theme, and recall to mind 
the helpless and hopeless bewilderment 
into which all theologies and all philoso- 
phies have been thrown by the problem of 
the existence of evil. From the ancient 
Greek and Hebrew thinkers who were sad- 
dened by the spectacle of wickedness inso- 
lent and unpunished, down to the aged 
Voltaire and the youthful Goethe who felt 
their theories of God's justice quite baffled 
by the Lisbon earthquake, or down to the 
atheistic pessimist of our own time who 
asserts that the Power which sustains the 



The Mystery of Evil g 

world is but a blind and terrible force with- 
out concern for man's welfare of body or 
of soul, — from first to last the history of 
philosophy teems with the mournful in- 
stances of this discouragement. In that 
tale of War and Peace wherein the fervid 
genius of Tolstoi has depicted scenes and 
characters of modern life with truthful 
grandeur like that of the ancient epic 
poems, when our friend, the genial and 
thoughtful hero of the story, stands in the 
public square at Moscow, uncertain of his 
fate, while the kindly bright-faced peasant 
and the eager pale young mechanic are shot 
dead by his side, and all for a silly susr- 
picion on the part of Napoleon's soldiery ; 
as he stands and sees the bodies, still warm 
and quivering, tossed into a trench and 
loose earth hastily shovelled over them, his 
manly heart surges in rebellion against a 
world in which such things can be, and a 
voice within him cries out, — not in the . 
mood in which the fool crieth, but with the 
anguish of a tender soul wrung by the sight 



JO The Mystery of Evil 

of stupendous iniquity, — ^' There is no 
God ! '' It is but the utterance of an old- 
world feeling, natural enough to hard- 
pressed and sorely tried humanity in those 
moments that have come to it only too 
often, when triumphant wrong is dreadfully 
real and close at hand, while anything like 
compensation seems shadowy and doubtful 
and far away. 

It is this feeling that has created the 
belief in a devil, an adversary to the good 
God, an adversary hard to conquer or baffle. 
The feeling underlies every theological 
creed, and in every system of philosophy 
we find it lurking somewhere. In these 
dark regions of thought, which science has 
such scanty means for exploring, the state- 
ments which make up a creed are apt to 
be the outgrowth of such an all-pervading 
sentiment, while their form will be found 
to vary with the knowledge of nature — 
meagre enough at all times, and even in 
our boasted time — which happens to char- 
acterize the age in which they are made. 



The Mystery of Evil / / 

Hence, well-nigh universally has philosophy 
proceeded upon the assumption, whether 
tacit or avowed, that pain and wrong are 
: hings hard to be reconciled with the theory 
rhat the world is created and ruled by a 
J3eing at once all-powerful and all-benevo- 
'ent. Why does such a Being permit the 
misery that we behold encompassing us on 
•ivery side ? When we would fain believe 
ihat God is love indeed, and love creation's 
linal law, how comes it that nature, red in 
looth and claw with ravine, shrieks against 
)ur creed ? If this question could be fairly 
answered, does it not seem as if the burden 
)f life, which so often seems intolerable, 
ATOuld forthwith slip from our shoulders, 
and leave us, like Bunyan's pilgrim, free 
and bold and light-hearted to contend 
against all the ills of the world ? 

Ever since human intelligence became 
enlightened enough to grope for a meaning 
and purpose in human life, this problem of 
the existence of evil has been the burden 
of man. In the effort to throw it off, lead- 



12 The Mystery of Evil 

ers of thought have had recourse to almost 
every imaginable device. It has usually 
been found necessary to represent the Cre- 
ator as finite either in power or in good- 
ness, although the limitation is seldom 
avowed, except by writers who have a lean- 
ing toward atheism and take a grim plea- 
sure in pointing out flaws in the constitu- 
tion of things. Among modern writers the 
most conspicuous instance of this temper 
is afforded by that much too positive phi- 
losopher Auguste Comte, who would fain 
have tipped the earth's axis at a different 
angle and altered the arrangements of na- 
ture in many fanciful ways. He was like 
Alphonso, the learned king of Castile, who 
regretted that he had not been present 
when the world was created, — he could 
have given such excellent advice ! 

In a very different mood the great Leib- 
nitz, in his famous theory of optimism, 
argued that a perfect world is in the nature 
of things impossible, but that the world in 
which we live is the best of possible worlds. 



The Mystery of Evil i^ 

The limitation of the Creator's power is 
made somewhat more explicitly by Plato, 
who regarded the world as the imperfect 
realization of a Divine Idea that in itself is 
perfect. It is owing to the intractableness 
and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea 
finds itself so imperfectly realized. Thus 
the Creator's power is limited by the nature 
of the material out of which he makes the 
world. In other words, the world in which 
we live is the best the Creator could make 
out of the wretched material at his disposal. 
This Platonic view is closely akin to that 
of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise 
as to lend itself more readily to myth-mak- 
ing. Matter is not only considered as what 
Dr. Martineau would call a ^^ datum objec- 
tive to God," but it is endowed with a dia- 
bolical character of its own. 



Ill 



Manichceism and Calvinism 




T is but a step from this to the com- 



pUcated personifications of Gnosti- 
cism, with its Demiurgus, or in- 
ferior spirit that created the world. By 
some of the Gnostics the Creator was held 
to be merely an inferior emanation from 
God, a notion which had a powerful indi- 
rect effect upon the shaping of Christian 
doctrine in the second and third centuries 
of our era. A similar thought appears in 
the mournful question asked by Tennyson's 
Arthur : — 

" O me ! for why is all around us here 
As if some lesser god had made the world 
And had not force to shape it as he would? " 

But some Gnostics went so far as to hold 
that the world was originally created by the 
Devil, and is to be gradually purified and 



The Mystery of Evil 75 

redeemed by the beneficent power of God 
as manifested through Jesus Christ. This 
notion is just the opposite to that of the 
Vendidad, which represents the world as 
coming into existence pure and perfect, 
only to be forthwith defiled by the trail of 
the serpent Ahriman. In both these oppos- 
ing theories the divine power is distinctly 
and avowedly curtailed by the introduction 
of a rival power that is diabolical ; upon 
this point Parsee and Gnostic are agreed. 
Distinct sources are postulated for the evil 
and the good. The one may be regarded 
as infinite in goodness, the other as infi- 
nite in badness, and the world in which we 
live is a product of the everlasting conflict 
between the two. This has been the fun- 
damental idea in all Manichaean systems, 
and it is needless to say that it has always 
exerted a mighty influence upon Christian 
theology. The Christian conception of the 
Devil, as regards its deeper ethical aspect, 
has owed much to the Parsee conception of 
Ahriman. It can hardly be said, however, 



1 6 The Mystery of Evil 

that there has been any coherent, closely 
reasoned, and generally accepted Christian 
theory of the subject. The notions just 
mentioned are in themselves too shadowy 
and vague, they bear too plainly the marks 
of their mythologic pedigree, to admit of 
being worked into such a coherent and 
closely reasoned theory. Christian thought 
has simply played fast and loose with these 
conceptions, speaking in one breath of di- 
vine omnipotence, and in the next alluding 
to the conflict between good and evil in 
language fraught with Manichaeism. 

In recent times Mr. John Stuart Mill 
has shown a marked preference for the 
Manichaean view, and has stated it with 
clearness and consistency, because he is not 
hampered by the feeling that he ought to 
reach one conclusion rather than another. 
Mr. Mill does not urge his view upon the 
reader, nor even defend it as his own view, 
but simply suggests it as perhaps the view 
which is for the theist most free from diffi- 
culties and contradictions. Mr. Mill does 



The Mystery of Evil 17 

not, like the Manichaeans, imagine a per- 
sonified principle of evil ; nor does he, like 
Plato, entertain a horror of what is some- 
times, with amusing vehemence, stigma- 
tized as "brute matter." He does not un- 
dertake to suggest how or why the divine 
power is limited ; but he distinctly prefers 
the alternative which sacrifices the attribute 
of omnipotence in order to preserve in our 
conception of Deity the attribute of good- 
ness. According to Mr. Mill, we may re- 
gard the all-wise and holy Deity as a crea- 
tive energy that is perpetually at work in 
eliminating evil from the universe. His 
wisdom is perfect, his goodness is infinite, 
but his power is limited by some inexplica- 
ble viciousness in the original constitution 
of things which it must require a long suc- 
cession of ages to overcome. In such a 
view Mr. Mill sees much that is ennobling. 
The humblest human being who resists an 
impulse to sin, or helps in the slightest 
degree to leave the world better than he 
found it, may actually be regarded as a 



/S The Mystery of Evil 

participator in the creative work of God ; 
and thus each act of human life acquires a 
solemn significance that is almost over- 
whelming to contemplate. 

These suggestions of Mr. Mill are ex- 
tremely interesting, because he was the last 
great modern thinker whose early training 
was not influenced by that prodigious ex- 
pansion of scientific knowledge which, since 
the middle of the nineteenth century, has 
taken shape in the doctrine of evolution. 
This movement began early enough to de- 
termine the intellectual careers of eminent 
thinkers born between 1820 and 1830, such 
as Spencer and Huxley. Mr. Mill was a 
dozen years too old for this. He was born 
at nearly the same time as Mr. Darwin, but 
his mental habits were formed too soon for'^ 
him to profit fully by the new movement of 
thought ; and although his attitude toward 
the new ideas was hospitable, they never 
fructified in his mind. While his thinking 
has been of great value to the world, much 
of it belongs to an era which we have now 



The Mystery of Evil ig 

left far behind. This is illustrated in the 
degree to which he was influenced by the 
speculations of Auguste Comte. Probably 
no two leaders of thought, whose dates of 
birth were scarcely a quarter of a century 
apart, were ever separated by such a stu- 
pendous gulf as that which intervenes be- 
tween Auguste Comte and Herbert Spen- 
cer, and this fact may serve as an index to 
the rapidity of movement which has char 
acterized the nineteenth century. Another 
illustration of the old-fashioned character 
of Mill's philosophy is to be seen in his use 
of Paley's argument from design in support 
of the belief in a beneficent Creator. Mill 
adopted this argument, and, as a professed 
free-thinker, carried it to the logical con- 
^xlusion from which Paley, as a churchman, 
could not but shrink. This was the con- 
clusion which I have already mentioned, 
that God's creative power has been limited 
by some inexplicable viciousness in the 
original constitution of things. 

I feel as if one could not be too grateful 



20 The Mystery of Evil 

to Mr. Mill for having so neatly and sharply- 
stated, in modern language and with mod- 
ern illustrations, this old conclusion, which 
after all is substantially that of Plato and 
the Gnostics. For the shock which such a 
clear, bold statement gives to our religious 
feelings is no greater than the shock with 
which it strikes counter to our modern sci- 
entific philosophy. Suppose we could bring 
back to earth a Calvinist of the seventeenth 
century and question him. He might well 
say that the God which Mr. Mill offers us, 
shorn of the attribute of omnipotence, is no 
God at all. He would say with the Hebrew 
prophet, that God has created the evil along 
with the good, and that he has done so for 
a purpose which human reason, could it 
once comprehend all the conditions of the ^r 
case, would most surely approve as infi- 
nitely wise and holy. Our Calvinist would' 
ask who is responsible for the original con- 
stitution of things if not the Creator him- 
self, and in supposing anything essentially 
vicious in that constitution, have not Plato 



The Mystery of Evil 21 

and the Gnostics and the Manichaeans and 
Mr. Mill simply taken counsel of their igno- 
rance ? Nay, more, the Calvinist would 
declare that if we really understood the 
universe of which humanity is a part, we 
should find scientific justification for that 
supreme and victorious faith which cries, 
"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in 
him ! '' The man who has acquired such 
faith as this is the true freeman of the uni- 
verse, clad in stoutest coat of mail against 
disaster and sophistry, — the man whom 
nothing can enslave, and whose guerdon is 
the serene happiness that can never be 
taken away. 



IV 



The Dramatic Unity of Nature 




OW in these strong assertions it 
seems to me that the Calvinist is 
much more nearly in accord with 
our modern knowledge than are Plato and 
Mill. It is not wise to hazard statements 
as to what the future may bring forth, but 
I do not see how the dualism implied in all 
these attempts to refer good and evil to dif- 
ferent creative sources can ever be seriously 
maintained again. The advance of modern 
science carries us irresistibly to what some 
German philosophers call monism, but I 
prefer to call it monotheism. In getting 
rid of the Devil and regarding the universe 
as the multiform manifestation of a single 
all-pervading Deity, we become for the first 
time pure and uncompromising monotheists, 
— believers in the ever-living, unchange- 



The Mystery of Evil 2} 

able, and all- wise Heavenly Father, in whom 
we may declare our trust without the faint- 
est trace of mental reservation. 

If we can truly take such a position, and 
hold it rationally, it is the modern science 
so apt to be decried by the bats and owls of 
orthodoxy that justifies us in doing so. For 
what is the philosophic purport of these 
beautiful and sublime discoveries with which 
the keen insight and patient diligence of 
modern students of science are beginning 
to be rewarded ? What is the lesson that 
is taught alike by the correlation of forces, 
by spectrum analysis, by the revelations of 
chemistry as to the subtle behaviour of mole- 
cules inaccessible to the eye of sense, by 
the astronomy that is beginning to sketch 
the physical history of countless suns in the 
firmament, by the palaeontology which is 
slowly unravelling the wonders of past life 
upon the earth through millions of ages ? 
What is the grand lesson that is taught by 
all this ? It is the lesson of the unity of 
nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that 



24 The Mystery of Evil 

all the things that we can see and know, 
in the course of our life in this world, are 
so intimately woven together that nothing 
could be left out without reducing the whole 
marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else 
may be true, the conviction is brought home 
to us that in all this endless multifarious- 
ness there is one single principle at work, 
that all is tending toward an end that was 
involved from the very beginning, if one 
can speak of beginnings and ends where 
the process is eternal. The whole universe 
is animated by a single principle of life, and 
whatever we see in it, whether to our half- 
trained understanding and narrow expe- 
rience it may seem to be good or bad, is 
an indispensable part of the stupendous 
scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, 
in one of those characteristic flashes of in- 
sight into the heart of things in which no 
one has ever excelled him, in nature there is 
nothing that is out of place or interpolated, 
as in an ill-constructed drama. 

To-day we can begin to realize how much 



The Mystery of Evil 2^ 

was implied in this prophetic h'int of Aris- 
totle's, for we are forced to admit that what- 
ever may be the function of evil in this 
world, it is unquestionably an indispensable 
function, and not something interpolated 
from without. Whatever exists is part of 
the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be 
proved. The goodness in the world — all 
that we love and praise and emulate — we* 
are ready enough to admit into our scheme 
of things, and to rest upon it our belief in 
God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, 
we would fain leave out. But if there were 
no such thing as evil, how could there be 
such a thing as goodness f Or to put it 
somewhat differently, if we had never 
known anything but goodness, how could 
we ever distinguish it from evil } How 
could we recognize it as good } How would 
its quality of goodness in any wise interest 
or concern us f This question goes down 
to the bottom of things, for it appeals to 
the fundamental conditions according to 
which conscious intelligence exists at all. 



26 The Mystery of Evil 

Its answer will therefore be likely to help 
us. It will not enable us to solve the pro- 
blem of evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery 
impenetrable by finite intelligence, but it 
will help us to state the problem correctly ; 
and surely this is no small help. In the 
mere work of purifying our intellectual vis- 
ion there is that which heals and soothes 
us. To learn to see things without distor- 
tion is to prepare one's self for taking the 
world in the right mood, and in this we find 
strength and consolation. 



V 




IVhat Conscious Life is made of 

O return to our question, how could 
we have good without evil, we must 
pause for a moment and inquire 
into the constitution of the human mind. 
What we call the soul, the mind, the con- 
scious self, is something strange and won- 
derful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive 
it, invisible and impalpable as it is, we are 
apt to try so strenuously to divorce it from 
the notion of substance that it seems ethe- 
real, unreal, ghostlike. Yet of all realities 
the soul is the most solid, sound, and un- 
deniable. Thoughts and feelings are the 
fundamental facts from which there is no 
escaping. Our whole universe, from the 
sands on the seashore to the flaming suns 
that throng the Milky Way, is built up of 
sights and sounds, of tastes and odours, of 



\ 

28 The Mystery of Evil 

pleasures and pains, of sensations of mo- 
tion and resistance either felt directly or 
inferred. This is no ghostly universe, but 
all intensely real as it exists in that in- 
tensest of realities, the human soul ! Con- 
sciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is 
the most fundamental of facts. But a 
truly marvellous affair is consciousness ! 
The most general truth that we can assert 
with regard to it is this, that it exists only 
by virtue of incessant change. A state of 
consciousness that should continue through 
an appreciable interval of time without un- 
dergoing change would not be a state of 
consciousness. It would be unconscious- 
ness. 

This perpetual change, then, is what 
makes conscious life. It is only by virtue 
of this endless procession of fleeting phases 
of consciousness that the human soul ex- 
ists at all. It is thus that we are made. 
Why we should have been made thus is 
a question aiming so far beyond our ken 
that it is idle to ask it. We might as weU 



The Mystery of Evil 2g 

inquire whether Infinite Power could have 
made twice two equal five. We must rest 
content with knowing that it is thus we 
were created ; it is thus that the human 
soul exists. Just as dynamic astronomy- 
rests upon the law of gravitation, just as 
physics is based upon the properties of 
waves, so the modern science of mind 
has been built upon the fundamental 
truth that consciousness exists only by 
virtue of unceasing change. Our con- 
scious life is a stream of varying psy- 
chical states which quickly follow one an- 
other in a perpetual shimmer, with never 
an instant of rest. The elementary psy- 
chical states, indeed, lie below conscious- 
ness, or, as we say, they are sub-conscious. 
We may call these primitive pulsations the 
psychical molecules out of which are com- 
pounded the feelings and thoughts that 
well up into the full stream of conscious- 
ness. Just as in chemistry we explain the 
qualitative differences among things as due 
to diversities of arrangement among com- 



50 The Mystery of Evil 

pounded molecules and* atoms, so in psy- 
chology we have come to see that thoughts 
and feelings in all their endless variety are 
diversely compounded of sub-conscious 
psychical molecules. 

Musical sounds furnish us with a simple 
and familiar illustration of this. When the 
sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the 
ear slowly, at the rate of not more than 
sixteen in a second, they are cognized as 
separate and non-musical noises. When 
they pass beyond that rate of speed, they 
are cognized as a continuous musical tone 
of very low pitch ; a state of consciousness 
which seems simple, but which we now see 
is really compound. As the speed of the 
blows increases, further qualitative differ- 
ences arise ; the musical tone rises in 
pitch until it becomes too acute for the ear 
to cognize, and thus vanishes from con- 
sciousness. But this is far from being the 
whole story ; for the series of blows or pul- 
sations make not only a single vivid funda- 
mental tone, but also a multifarious com- 



The Mystery of Evil 31 

panion group of fainter overtones, and the 
diverse blending of these faint harmonics 
constitutes the whole difference in tone 
quality between the piano and the flute, the 
violin and the trumpet, or any other instru- 
ments. If you take up a violin and sound 
the F one octave above the treble staff, 
there are produced, in the course of a single 
second, several thousand psychical states 
which together make up the sensation of 
pitch, fifty-five times as many psychical 
states which together make up the sensa- 
tion of tone quality, and an immense num- 
ber of other psychical states which to- 
gether make up the sensation of intensity. 
These psychical states are "not, in any 
strict sense of the term, states of con- 
sciousness ; for if they were to rise indi- 
vidually into consciousness, the result 
would be an immense multitude of sensa- 
tions, and not a single apparently homo- 
geneous sensation. There is no alterna- 
tive but to conclude that in this case a 
seemingly simple state of consciousness is 



S2 The Mystery of Evil 

in reality compounded of an immense mul- 
titude of sub-conscious psychical changes. 

Now, what is thus true in the case of 
musical sounds is equally true of all states 
of consciousness whatever, both those that 
we call intellectual and those that we call 
emotional. All are highly compounded 
aggregates of innumerable minute sub-con- 
scious psychical pulsations, if we may so call 
them. In every stream of human con- 
sciousness that we call a soul each second 
of time witnesses thousands of infinitely 
small changes, in which one fleeting group 
of pulsations in the primordial mind-stuff 
gives place to another and a different but 
equally fleeting group. Each group is un- 
like its immediate predecessor. The absence 
of difference would be continuance, and 
continuance means stagnation, blankness, 
negation, death. That ceaseless flutter, 
in which the quintescence of conscious life 
consists, is kept up by the perpetual intro- 
duction of the relations of likeness and 
unlikeness. Each one of the infinitesimal 



The Mystery of Evil ^3 

changes is a little act of discrimination, a 
recognition of a unit of feeling as either 
like or unlike some other unit of feeling. 
So in these depths, of the soul's life the 
arrangements and re-arrangements of units 
go on, while on the surface the results 
appear from moment to moment in sensa- 
tions keen or dull, in perceptions clear or 
vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in mem- 
ories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of 
thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love. 
The whole fabric of human thought and 
human emotion is built up out of minute 
sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses 
and unlikenesses, just as much as the ma- 
terial world in all its beauty is built up out 
of undulations among invisible molecules. 






VI 

Without the Element of Antagonism there 
could he no Consciousness, and therefore 
no World 



E may now come up out of these 
depths, accessible only to the plum- 
met of psychologic analysis, and 
move with somewhat freer gait in the re- 
gion of common and familiar experiences. 
It is an undeniable fact that we cannot 
know anything whatever except as con- 
trasted with something else. The contrast 
may be bold and sharp, or it may dwindle 
into a slight discrimination, but it must be 
there. If the figures on your canvas are 
indistinguishable from the background, 
there is surely no picture to be seen. Some 
element of unlikeness, some germ of antag- 
onism, some chance for discrimination, is 
essential to every act of knowing. I might 



The Mystery of Evil ^5 

have illustrated this point concretely with- 
out all the foregoing explanation, but I 
have aimed at paying it the respect due to 
its vast importance. I have wished to show 
how the fact that we cannot know anything 
whatever except as contrasted with some- 
thing else is a fact that is deeply rooted in 
the innermost structure of the human mind. 
It is not a superficial but a fundamental 
truth, that if there were no colour but red it 
would be exactly the same thing as if there 
were no colour at all. In a world of unqual- 
ified redness, our state of mind with regard 
to colour would be precisely like our state 
of mind in the present world with regard to 
the pressure of the atmosphere if we were 
always to stay in one place. We are always 
bearing up against the burden of this deep 
aerial ocean, nearly fifteen pounds upon 
every square inch of our bodies ; but until 
we can get a chance to discriminate, as by 
climbing a mountain, we are quite uncon- 
scious of this heavy pressure. In the same 
way, if we knew but one colour we should 



^6 77?^ Mystery of Evil 

know no colour. If our ears were to be 
filled with one monotonous roar of Niagara, 
unbroken by alien sounds, the effect upon 
consciousness would be absolute silence. 
If our palates had never come in contact 
with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should 
know no more of sweetness than of bitter- 
ness. If we had never felt physical pain, 
we could not recognize physical pleasure. 
For want of the contrasted background its 
pleasurableness would be non-existent. And 
in just the same way it follows that without 
knowing that which is morally evil we could 
not possibly recognize that which is morally 
good. Of these antagonist correlatives, 
the one is unthinkable in the absence of 
the other. In a sinless and painless world, 
human conduct might possess more out- 
ward marks of perfection than any saint 
ever dreamed of ; but the moral element 
would be lacking ; the goodness would have 
no more significance in our conscious life 
than that load of atmosphere which we are 
always carrying about with us. 



The Mystery of Evil ^j 

We are thus brought to a striking con- 
clusion, the essential soundness of which 
cannot be gainsaid. In a happy world there 
must be sorrow and pain, and in a moral 
world the knowledge of evil is indispensa- 
ble. The stern necessity for this has been 
proved to inhere in the innermost constitu- 
tion of the human soul. It is part and par- 
cel of the universe. To him who is disposed 
to cavil at the world which God has in such 
wise created, we may fairly put the ques- 
tion whether the prospect of escape from 
its ills would ever induce him to put off this 
human consciousness, and accept in ex- 
change some form of existence unknown 
and inconceivable ! The alternative is clear : 
on the one hand a world with sin and suf- 
fering, on the other hand an unthinkable 
world in which conscious life does not in- 
volve contrast. 

The profound truth of Aristotle's remark 
is thus more forcibly than ever brought 
home to us. We do not find that evil has 
been interpolated into the universe from 



^8 The Mystery of Evil 

without ; we find that, on the contrary, it 
is an indispensable part of the dramatic 
whole. God is the creator of evil, and from 
the eternal scheme of things diabolism is 
forever excluded. Ormuzd and Ahriman 
have had their day and perished, along with 
the doctrine of special creations and other 
fancies of the untutored human mind. 
From our present standpoint we may fairly 
ask. What would have been the worth of 
that primitive innocence portrayed in the 
myth of the garden of Eden, had it ever been 
realized in the life of men } What would 
have been the moral value or significance of 
a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and 
doing beneficent acts with no more con- 
sciousness or volition than the deftly con- 
trived machine that picks up raw material 
at one end, and turns out some finished 
product at the other } Clearly, for strong 
and resolute men and women an Eden 
would be but a fool's paradise. How could 
anything fit to be called character have ever 
been produced there } But for tasting the 



The Mystery of Evil 59 

forbidden fruit, in what respect could man 
have become a being of higher order than 
the beasts of the field ? An interesting 
question is this, for it leads us to consider 
the genesis of the idea of moral evil in man. 



VII 




A Word of Caution 

EFORE we enter upon this topic 
a word of caution may be needed. 
I do not wish the purpose of the 
foregoing questions to be misunderstood. 
The serial nature of human thinking and 
speaking makes it impossible to express 
one's thought on any great subject in a 
solid block ; one must needs give it forth 
in consecutive fragments, so that parts of 
it run the risk of being lost upon the reader 
or hearer, while other parts are made to 
assume undue proportions. Moreover, there 
are many minds that habitually catch at the 
fragments of a thought, and never seize 
it in the block; and in such manner do 
strange misconceptions arise. I never could 
have dreamed, until taught by droll experi- 
ence, that the foregoing allusions to the 



The Mystery of Evil 41 

garden of Eden could be understood as a 
glorification of sin, and an invitation to my 
fellow-men to come forth with me and be 
wicked ! But even so it was, on one occa- 
sion when I was trying, somewhat more 
scantily than here, to state the present case. 
In the midst of my endeavour to justify 
the grand spirit of faith which our fathers 
showed when from abysmal depths of afflic- 
tion they never failed to cry that God doeth 
all things well, I was suddenly interrupted 
with queries as to just what percentage of 
sin and crime I regarded as needful for the 
moral equilibrium of the universe ; how 
much did I propose to commit myself, how 
much would I advise people in general to 
commit, and just where would I have them 
stop ! Others deemed it necessary to re- 
mind me that there is already too much 
suffering in the world, and we ought not 
to seek to increase it ; that the difference 
between right and wrong is of great practi- 
cal importance ; and that if we try to treat 
evil as good we shall make good no better 
than evil. 



42 The Mystery of Evil 

When one has sufficiently recovered one's 
gravity, it is permissible to reply to such 
criticisms that the sharp antithesis between 
good and evil is essential to every step of 
my argument, which would entirely col- 
lapse if the antagonism were for one mo- 
ment disregarded. The quantity of suffer- 
ing in the world is unquestionably so great 
as to prompt us to do all in our power to 
diminish it ; such we shall presently see 
must be the case in a world that proceeds 
through stages of evolution. When one 
reverently assumes that it was through 
some all-wise and holy purpose that sin was 
permitted to come into the world, it ought 
to be quite superfluous to add that the ful- 
filment of any such purpose demands that 
sin be not cherished, but suppressed. If 
one seeks, as a philosopher, to explain and 
justify God's wholesale use of death in the 
general economy of the universe, is one 
forsooth to be charged with praising mur- 
der as a fine art and with seeking to found 
a society of Thugs } 




VIII 




7he Hermit and the d/Jngel 

IJHE simple-hearted monks of the 
Middle Ages understood, in their 
own quaint way, that God's meth- 
ods of governing this universe are not al- 
ways fit to be imitated by his finite crea- 
tures. In one of the old stories that 
furnished entertainment and instruction for 
the cloister it is said that a hermit and an 
angel once journeyed together. The angel 
was in human form and garb, but had told 
his companion the secret of his exalted 
rank and nature. Coming at nightfall to a 
humble house by the wayside, the two trav- 
ellers craved shelter for the love of God. 
A dainty supper and a soft, warm bed were 
given them, and in the middle of the night 
the angel arose and strangled the kind 
host's infant son, who was quietly sleeping 



44 The Mystery of Evil 

in his cradle. The good hermit was para- 
lyzed with amazement and horror, but dared 
not speak a word. The next night the two 
comrades were entertained at a fine man- 
sion in the city, where the angel stole the 
superb golden cup from which his host had 
quaffed wine at dinner. Next day, while 
crossing the bridge over a deep and rapid 
stream, a pilgrim met the travellers. " Canst 
thou show us, good father," said the angel, 
" the way to the next town .? '* As the 
pilgrim turned to point it out, this terrible 
being caught him by the shoulder and flung 
him into the river to drown. ** Verily,'' 
thought the poor hermit, " it is a devil that 
I have here with me, and all his works are 
evil ; '' but fear held his tongue, and the 
twain fared on their way till the sun had 
set and snow began to fall, and the howling 
of wolves was heard in the forest hard by. 
Presently the bright light coming from a 
cheerful window gave hope of a welcome 
refuge ; but the surly master of the house 
turned the travellers away from his door 



The Mystery of Evil 4^ 

with curses and foul gibes. "Yonder is 
my pig-sty for dirty vagrants like you." 
So they passed that night among the swine ; 
and in the morning the angel went to the 
house and thanked the master for his hospi- 
tality, and gave him for a keepsake (thrifty 
angel !) the stolen goblet. Then did the 
hermit's wrath and disgust overcome his 
fears, and he loudly upbraided his com- 
panion. " Get thee gone, wretched spirit ! " 
he cried. *^ I will have no more of thee. 
Thou pretendest to be a messenger from 
heaven, yet thou requitest good with evil, 
and evil with good ! " Then did the angel 
look upon him with infinite compassion in 
his eyes. " Listen,'' said he, " short-sighted 
mortal. The birth of that infant son had 
made the father covetous, breaking God's 
commandments in order to heap up trea- 
sures which the boy, if he had lived, would 
have wasted in idle debauchery. By my 
act, which seemed so cruel, I saved both 
parent and child. The owner of the goblet 
had once been abstemious, but was fast 



46 The Mystery of Evil 

becoming a sot ; the loss of his cup has set 
him to thinking, and he will mend his ways. 
The poor pilgrim, unknown to himself, was 
about to commit a mortal sin, when I inter- 
fered and sent his unsullied soul to heaven. 
As for the wretch who drove God's chil- 
dren from his door, he is, indeed, pleased 
for the moment with the bauble I left in 
his hands ; but hereafter he will burn in 
hell.*' So spoke the angel ; and when he 
had heard these words the hermit bowed 
his venerable head and murmured, " For- 
give me. Lord, that in my ignorance I mis- 
judged thee." 

I suspect that, with all our boasted sci- 
ence, there is still much wisdom for us in 
the humble childlike piety of the Gesta 
Romanorum. To say that the ways of 
Providence are inscrutable is still some- 
thing more than an idle platitude, and 
there still is room for the belief that, could 
we raise the veil that enshrouds eternal 
truth, we should see that behind nature's 
cruelest works there are secret springs of 



77?^ Mystery of Evil 47 

divinest tenderness and love. In this trust- 
ful mood we may now return to the ques- 
tion as to the genesis of the idea of moral 
evil, and its close connection with man's 
rise from a state of primeval innocence. 



IX 




Mans Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood 

E have first to note that in various 
ways the action of natural selec- 
tion has been profoundly modified 
in the course of the development of man- 
kind from a race of inferior creatures. One 
of the chief factors in the production of 
man was the change that occurred in the 
direction of the working of natural selec- 
tion, whereby in the line of man's direct 
ancestry the variations in intelligence came 
to be seized upon, cherished, and enhanced, 
to the comparative neglect of variations in 
bodily structure. The physical differences 
between man and ape are less important 
than the physical differences between Afri- 
can and South American apes. The latter 
belong to different zoological families, but 
the former do not. Zoologically, man is 



The Mystery of Evil 49 

simply one genus in the old-world family 
of apes. Psychologically, he has travelled 
so far from apes that the distance is 
scarcely measurable. This transcendent 
contrast is primarily due to the change in 
the direction of the working of natural 
selection. The consequences of this change 
were numerous and far-reaching. One con- 
sequence was that gradual lengthening of 
the plastic period of infancy which enabled 
man to became a progressive creature, and 
organizej/l the primeval semi-human horde 
into definite family groups. I have else- 
where expounded this point, and it is known 
as my own especial contribution to the 
theory of evolution. 

Another associated consequence, which 
here more closely concerns us, was the 
partial stoppage of the process of natural 
selection in remedying unfitness. A quo- 
tation from Herbert Spencer will help us to 
understand this partial stoppage : ** As fast 
as the faculties are multiplied, so fast does 
it become possible for the several mem- 



^o The Mystery of Evil 

bers of a species to have various kinds of 
superiorities over one another. While one 
saves its life by higher speed, another does 
the like by clearer vision, another by keener 
scent, another by quicker hearing, another 
by greater strength, another by unusual 
power of enduring cold or hunger, another 
by special sagacity, another by special timid- 
ity, another by special courage. . . . Now 
. . . each of these attributes, giving its pos- 
sessor an extra chance of life, is likely to 
be transmitted to posterity. But " it is not 
nearly so likely to be increased by natural 
selection. For " if those members of the 
species which have but ordinary'' or even 
deficient shares of some valuable attribute 
"nevertheless survive by virtue of other 
superiorities which they severally possess, 
then it is not easy to see how this particu- 
lar attribute can be " enhanced in subse- 
quent generations by natural selection.^ 

These considerations apply especially to 
the human race with its multitudinous capa- 

1 Biology, i. 454. 



The Mystery of Evil 5/ 

cities, and I can better explain the case by 
a crude and imperfect illustration than by a 
detailed and elaborate statement. If an 
individual antelope falls below the average 
of the herd in speed, he is sure to become 
food for lions, and thus the high average of 
speed in the herd is maintained by natural 
selection. But if an individual man becomes 
a drunkard, though his capabilities be ever 
so much curtailed by this vice, yet the 
variety of human faculty furnishes so many 
hooks with which to keep one's hold upon 
life that he may sin long and flagrantly 
without perishing ; and if the drunkard sur- 
vives, the action of natural selection in weed- 
ing out drunkenness is checked. There is 
thus a wide interval between the highest 
and lowest degrees of completeness m liv- 
ing that are compatible with maintenance 
of life. Mankind has so many other quali- 
ties beside the bad ones, which enable it to 
subsist and achieve progress in spite of 
them, that natural selection — which always 
works through death — cannot come into 
play. 



52 77?^ Mystery of Evil 

Now it is because of this interval between 
the highest and lowest degrees of complete- 
ness of living that are compatible with the 
mere maintenance of life, that men can be 
distinguished as morally bad or morally 
good. In inferior animals, where there is 
no such interval, there is no developed mo- 
rality or conscience, though in a few of the 
higher ones there are the germs of these 
things. Morality comes upon the scene 
when there is an alternative offered of lead- 
ing better lives or worse lives. And just 
as up to this point the actions of the fore- 
fathers of mankind have been determined 
by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of 
pain, so now they begin to be practically 
determined by the pursuit of goodness and 
avoidance of evil. This rise from a bes- 
tial to a moral plane of existence involves 
the acquirement of the knowledge of good 
and evil. Conscience is generated to play a 
part analogous to that played by the sense 
of pain in the lower stages of life, and to 
keep us from wrong doing. To the mere 



The Mystery of Evil 5^ 

love of life, which is the conservative force 
that keeps the whole animal world in exist- 
ence, there now comes gradually to be super- 
added the feeling of religious aspiration, 
which is nothing more nor less than the 
yearning after the highest possible com- 
pleteness of spiritual life. In the lower 
stages of human development this religious 
aspiration has as yet but an embryonic ex- 
istence, and moral obligations are still but 
imperfectly recognized. It is only after 
long ages of social discipline, fraught with 
cruel afflictions and grinding misery, that 
the moral law becomes dominant and reli- 
gious aspiration intense and abiding in the 
soul. When such a stage is reached, we 
have at last in man a creature different in 
kind from his predecessors, and fit for an 
everlasting life of progress, for a closer and 
closer communion with God in beatitude 
that shall endure. 



X 



The Relativity of Evil 



S we survey the course of this won- 
derful evolution, it begins to become 
manifest that moral evil is simply 
the characteristic of the lower state of liv- 
ing as looked at from the higher state. Its 
existence is purely relative, yet it is pro- 
foundly real, and in a process of perpetual 
spiritual evolution its presence in some hide- 
ous form throughout a long series of upward 
stages is indispensable. Its absence would 
mean stagnation, quiescence, unprogressive- 
ness. For the moment we exercise con- 
scious choice between one course of action 
and another, we recognize the difference 
between better and worse, we foreshadow 
the whole grand contrast between good and 
bad. In the process of spiritual evolution, 
therefore, evil must needs be present. But 



The Mystery of Evil 55 

the nature of evolution also requires that it 
should be evanescent. In the higher stages 
that which is worse than the best need no 
longer be positively bad. After the nature 
of that which the upward-striving soul ab- 
hors has been forever impressed upon it, 
amid the long vicissitudes of its pilgrimage 
through the dark realms of sin and expia- 
tion, it is at length equipped for its final 
sojourn 

" In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love." 

From the general analogies furnished in the 
process of evolution, we are entitled to hope 
that, as it approaches its goal and man 
comes nearer to God, the fact of evil will 
lapse into a mere memory, in which the 
shadowed past shall serve as a background 
for the realized glory of the present. 

Thus we have arrived at the goal of my 
argument. We can at least begin to realize 
distinctly that unless our eyes had been 
opened at some time, so that we might 
come to know the good and the evil, we 
should never have become fashioned in 



^6 The Mystery of Evil 

God's image. We should have been the 
denizens of a world of puppets, where nei- 
ther morality nor religion could have found 
place or meaning. The mystery of evil 
remains a mystery still, but it is no longer 
a harsh dissonance such as greeted the 
poet's ear when the doors of hell were 
thrown open ; for we see that this mystery 
belongs among the profound harmonies in 
God's creation. This reflection may have 
in it something that is consoling as we look 
forth upon the ills of the world. Many are 
the pains of life, and the struggle with 
wickedness is hard ; its course is marked 
with sorrow and tears. But assuredly its 
deep impress upon the human soul is the 
indispensable background against which 
shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of 
heaven ! 



THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE 
AND SELF-SACRIFICE 



O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi 

Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna 

Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi ! 
Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, 

Legato con amore in un volume, 

Cib che per P universo si squaderna. 

Dante, Paradiso^ xxxiii. 82. 



The Summer Field, and what it tells us 




fjHERE are few sights in Nature 
more restful to the soul than a 
daisied field in June. Whether it 
be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe 
matin songs still echoing among the tree- 
tops, or while the luxuriant splendour of 
noontide fills the delicate tints of the early- 
foliage with a pure glory of light, or in that 
more pensive time when long shadows are 
thrown eastward and the fresh breath of 
the sea is felt, or even under the solemn 
mantle of darkness, when all forms have 
faded from sight and the night air is musi- 
cal with the murmurs of innumerable in- 
sects, amid all the varying moods through 
which the daily cycle runs, the abiding 
sense is of unalloyed happiness, the pro- 



6o Love and Self-Sacrifice 

found tranquillity of mind and heart that 
nothing ever brings save the contemplation 
of perfect beauty. One's thought is carried 
back for the moment to that morning of 
the world when God looked upon his work 
and saw that it was good. If in the infinite 
and eternal Creative Energy one might 
imagine some inherent impulse perpetually 
urging toward fresh creation, what could it 
be more likely to be than the divine con- 
tentment in giving objective existence to 
the boundless and subtle harmonies where- 
of our world is made 1 That it is a world 
of perfect harmony and unsullied beauty, 
who can doubt as he strolls through this 
summer field ? As our thought plays lightly 
with its sights and sounds, there is nothing 
but gladness in the laugh of the bobolink ; 
the thrush's tender note tells only of the 
sweet domestic companionship of the nest ; 
creeping and winged things emerging from 
their grubs fill us with the sense of abound- 
ing life; and the myriad buttercups, hal- 
lowed with vague memories of June days in 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 6i 

childhood, lose none of their charm in re- 
minding us of the profound sympathy and 
mutual dependence in which the worlds of 
flowers and insects have grown up. The 
blades of waving grass, the fluttering leaves 
upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare 
fascination ; for the green stuff that fills 
their cellular tissues, and the tissues of all 
green things that grow, is the w^orld's great 
inimitable worker of wonders ; its marvel- 
lous alchemy takes dead matter and breathes 
into it the breath of life. But for that ma- 
gician chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, 
such things as animal life and conscious in- 
telligence would be impossible ; there would 
be no problems of creation, nor philosopher 
to speculate upon them. Thus the delight 
that sense impression gives, as we wander 
among buttercups and daisies, becomes 
deepened into gratitude and veneration, till 
we quite understand how the rejuvenescence 
of Nature should in all ages have aroused 
men to acts of worship, and should call forth 
from modern masters of music, the most 



62 Love and SelfSacriftce 

religious of the arts of expression, outbursts 

of sublimest song. 

• And yet we need but come a little closer 
to the facts to find them apparently telling 
us a very different story. The moment we 
penetrate below the superficial aspect of 
things the scene is changed. In the folk- 
lore of Ireland there is a widespread belief 
in a fairyland of eternal hope and bright- 
ness and youth situated a little way below the 
roots of the grass. From that land of Tir 
nan Og, as the peasants call it, the secret 
springs of life shoot forth their scions in 
this visible world, and thither a few favoured 
mortals have now and then found their way. 
It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og 
that our stern science leads us, but into a 
scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and 
massacre. Macaulay tells of the battlefield 
of Neerwinden, that the next summer after 
that frightful slaughter the whole country- 
side was densely covered with scarlet pop- 
pies, which people beheld with awe as a 
token of wrath in heaven over the deeds 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 6^ 

wrought on earth by human passions. Any 
summer field, though mantled in softest 
green, is the scene of butchery as wholesale 
as that of Neerwinden and far more ruth- 
less. The life of its countless tiny denizens 
is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and 
jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by 
the way, of starvation from hunger and 
cold, of robbery utterly shameless and mur- 
der utterly cruel. That green sward in 
taking possession of its territory has exter- 
minated scores of flowering plants of the 
sort that human economics and aesthetics 
stigmatize as weeds ; nor do the blades of 
the victorious army dwell side by side in 
amity, but in their eagerness to dally with 
the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant 
one another without the smallest compunc- 
tion. Of the crawling insects and those 
that hum through the air, with the quaint 
snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, 
scarce one in a hundred but succumbs to 
the buffets of adverse fortune before it has 
achieved maturity and left offspring to re- 



64 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

place it. The early bird, who went forth in 
quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close 
of a day as full of strife and peril as ever 
knight-errant encountered, he did not him- 
self serve as a meal for some giant foe in the 
gloaming. When we think of the hawk's 
talons buried in the breast of the wren, 
while the relentless beak tears the little 
wings from the quivering, bleeding body, 
our mood toward Nature is changed, and we 
feel like recoiling from a world in which 
such black injustice, such savage disregard 
for others, is part of the general scheme. 



II 



Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 



UT as we look still further into the 
matter, our mood is changed once 
more. We find that this hideous 
hatred and strife, this wholesale famine and 
death, furnish the indispensable conditions 
for the evolution of higher and higher types 
of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless de- 
struction of all individuals that fall short of 
a certain degree of fitness to the circum- 
stances of life into which they are born, the 
type would inevitably degenerate, the life 
would become lower and meaner in kind. 
Increase in richness, variety, complexity of 
life is gained only by the selection of varia- 
tions above or beyond a certain mean, and 
the prompt execution of a death sentence 
upon all the rest. The principle of natural 
selection is in one respect intensely Calvin- 



66 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

istic ; it elects the one and damns the ninety 
and nine. In these processes of Nature 
there is nothing that savours of communis- 
tic equality; but "to him that hath shall be 
given, and from him that hath not shall 
be taken away even that which he hath." 
Through this selection of a favoured few, a 
higher type of life — or at all events a type 
in which there is more life — is attained in 
many cases, but not always. Evolution and 
progress are not synonymous terms. The 
survival of the fittest is not always a sur- 
vival of the best or of the most highly 
organized. The environment is sometimes 
such that increase of fitness means degener- 
ation of type, and the animal and vegetable 
worlds show many instances of degenera- 
tion. One brilliant instance is that which 
has preserved the clue to the remote ances- 
try of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid 
ascidian, rooted polyp-like on the sea beach 
in shallow water, has an embryonic history 
which shows that its ancestors had once 
seen better days, when they darted to and 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 6j 

fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the pro- 
phecy of a vertebrate skeleton within them. 
This is a case of marked degeneration. 
More often survival of the fittest simply 
preserves the type unchanged through long 
periods of time. But now and then under 
favourable circumstances it raises the type. 
At all events, whenever the type is raised, 
it is through survival of the fittest, implying 
destruction of all save the fittest. 

This last statement is probably true of 
all plants and of all animals except that 
as applied to the human race it needs some 
transcendently important qualifications 
which students of evolution are very apt to 
neglect. I shall by and by point out these 
qualifications. At present we may note 
that the development of civilization, on its 
political side, has been a stupendous strug- 
gle for life, wherein the possession of cer- 
tain physical and mental attributes has 
enabled some tribes or nations to prevail 
over others, and to subject or exterminate 
them. On its industrial side the struggle 



68 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

has been no less fierce ; the evolution of 
higher efficiency through merciless com- 
petition is a matter of common knowledge. 
Alike in the occupations of war and in those 
of peace, superior capacity has thriven upon 
victories in which small heed has been paid 
to the wishes or the welfare of the van- 
quished. In human history perhaps no re- 
lation has been more persistently repeated 
than that of the hawk and the wren. The 
aggression has usually been defended as 
in the interests of higher civilization, and 
in the majority of cases the defence has 
been sustained by the facts. It has indeed 
very commonly been true that the survival 
of the strongest is the survival of the 
fittest. 

Such considerations affect our mood to- 
ward Nature in a way that is somewhat 
bewildering. On the one hand, as we re- 
cognize in the universal strife and slaughter 
a stern discipline through which the stand- 
ard of animate existence is raised and the 
life of creatures variously enriched, we be- 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 69 

come to some extent reconciled to the facts. 
Assuming, as we all do, that the attainment 
of higher life is in itself desirable, our minds 
cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards 
things, however odious in themselves, that 
help toward the desirable end. Since we 
cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce 
in their existence as part of the machinery 
of God's providence, the intricacies of which 
our finite minds cannot hope to unravel. 
On the other hand, a thought is likely to 
arise which in days gone by we should have 
striven to suppress as too impious for utter- 
ance ; but it is wiser to let such thoughts 
find full expression, for only thus can we be 
sure of understanding the kind of problem 
we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this 
method of Nature, which achieves progress 
only through misery and death, an exceed- 
ingly brutal and clumsy method "f Life, one 
would think, must be dear to the everlast- 
ing Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to 
be held in the general scheme of things ! 
In order that some race of moths may at- 



yo Love and Self-Sacrifice 

tain a certain fantastic contour and marking 
of their wings, untold thousands of moths 
are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead 
of making the desirable object once for all, 
the method of Nature is to make something 
else and reject it, and so on through count- 
less ages, till by slow approximations the 
creative thought is realized. Nature is 
often called thrifty, yet could anything be 
more prodigal or more cynical than the 
waste of individual lives? Does it not re- 
mind one of Charles Lamb's famous story 
of the Chinaman whose house accidentally 
burned down and roasted a pig, whereupon 
the dainty meat was tasted and its fame 
spread abroad until epicures all over China 
were to be seen carrying home pigs and 
forthwith setting fire to their houses ? We 
need but add that the custom thus estab- 
lished lasted for centuries, during which 
every dinner of pig involved the sacrifice of 
a homestead, and we seem to have a close 
parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or 
of what is otherwise called in these days 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 7/ 

the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view 
as this the Cosmic Process appears in a 
high degree unintelHgent, not to say im- 
moral. 



Ill 



Caliban's Philosophy 




OLYTHEISM easily found a place 
for such views as these, inasmuch 
as it could explain the unseemly 
aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to 
malevolent deities. With Browning's Cali- 
ban, in his meditations upon Setebos, that 
god whom he conceived in his own image, 
the recklessness of Nature is mockery en- 
gendered half in spite, half in mere wanton- 
ness. Setebos, he says, 

" is strong and Lord, 
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs 
That march now from the mountain to the sea ; ' 
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, 
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off ; 
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
And two worms he whose nippers end in red; 
As it likes me each time, I do : So He." 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 7^ 

Such is the kmd of philosophy that com- 
mends itself to the beastly Caliban, as he 
sprawls in the mire with small eft things 
creeping down his back. His half-fledged 
mind can conceive no higher principle of 
action — nothing more artistic, nothing 
more masterful — than wanton mockery, 
and naturally he attributes it to his God ; 
it is for him a sufficient explanation of that 
little fragment of the Cosmic Process with 
which he comes into contact. 




IV 

Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no 
Relation to Moral Ends ? 

UT as long as we confine our at- 
tention to the universal struggle 
for life and the survival of the fit- 
test, without certain qualifications presently 
to be mentioned, it is difficult for the most 
profound intelligence to arrive at conclu- 
sions much more satisfactory than Cali- 
ban's. If the spirit shown in Nature's 
works as thus contemplated is not one of 
wanton mockery, it seems at any rate to be 
a spirit of stolid indifference. It indicates 
a Blind Force rather than a Beneficent 
Wisdom at the source of things. It is in 
some such mood as this that Huxley tells 
us, in his famous address delivered at Ox- 
ford, in 1893, that there is no sanction for 
morality in the Cosmic Process. " Men in 



Love and Self-Sacrifice j^ 

society/* he says, "are undoubtedly subject 
to the cosmic process. As among other 
animals, multiplication goes on without ces- 
sation and involves severe competition for 
the means of support. The struggle for 
existence tends to eliminate those less 
fitted to adapt themselves to the circum- 
stances of their existence. The strongest, 
the most self-assertive, tend to tread down 
the weaker. . . . Social progress means a 
checking of the cosmic process at every 
step and the substitution for it of another, 
which may be called the ethical process; 
the end of which is not the survival of 
those who may happen to be the fittest, 
in respect of the whole of the conditions 
which exist, but of those who are ethically 
the best." Again, says Huxley, "let us 
understand, once for all, that the ethical 
progress of society depends, not on imi- 
tating the cosmic process, still less in run- 
ning away from it, but in combating it." 
And again he tells us that while the moral 
sentiments have undoubtedly been evolved, 



76 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

yet since " the immoral sentiments have no 
less been evolved, there is so far as much 
natural sanction for the one as for the 
other/' And yet again, *'the cosmic pro- 
cess has no sort of relation to moral ends." 

When these statements were first made 
they were received with surprise, and they 
have since called forth much comment, for 
they sound like a retreat from the position 
which an evolutionist is expected to hold. 
They distinctly assert a breach of continu- 
ity between evolution in general and the 
evolution of Man in particular ; and thus 
they have carried joy to the hearts of 
sundry theologians, of the sort that like to 
regard Man as an infringer upon Nature. 
If there is no natural sanction for morality, 
then the sanction must be supernatural, 
and forthwith such theologians greet Hux- 
ley as an ally ! 

They are mistaken, however. Huxley 
does not really mean to assert any such 
breach of continuity as is here suggested. 
In a footnote to his printed address he 



Love and Self-Sacrifice yy 

makes a qualification which really cancels 
the group of statements I have quoted. 
"Of course," says Huxley, ** strictly speak- 
ing, social life and the ethical process, in 
virtue of which it advances toward perfec- 
tion, are part and parcel of the general pro- 
cess of evolution.'* Of course they are; 
and of course the general process of evo- 
lution is the cosmic process, it is Nature's 
way of doing things. But when my dear 
Huxley a moment ago was saying that the 
^' cosmic process has no sort of relation to 
moral ends," he was using the phrase in a 
more restricted sense ; he was using it as 
equivalent to what Darwin called " natural 
selection,'' what Spencer called ** survival of 
the fittest," which is only one part of the 
cosmic process. Now most assuredly sur- 
vival of the fittest, as such, has no sort of 
relation to moral ends. Beauty and ugli- 
ness, virtue and vice, are all alike to it. 
Side by side with the exquisite rose flour- 
ishes the hideous tarantula, and in too many 
cases the villain's chances of livelihood are 



y8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

better than the saints. As I said a while 
ago, if we confine our attention to the 
survival of the fittest in the struggle for 
existence, we are not likely to arrive at 
conclusions much more satisfactory than 
Caliban's 

" As it likes me each time, I do : So He." 

In such a universe we may look in vain 
for any sanction for morality, any justifica- 
tion for love and self-sacrifice ; we find no 
hope in it, no consolation ; there is not 
even dignity in it, nothing whatever but 
resistless all-producing and all-consuming 
energy. 

Such a universe, however, is not the one 
in which we live. In the cosmic process of 
evolution, whereof our individual lives are 
part and parcel, there are other agencies 
at work besides natural selection, and the 
story of the struggle for existence is far 
from being the whole story. I have thus 
far been merely stating difficulties ; it is 
now time to point out the direction in 
which we are to look for a solution of 



Love and Self-Sacrifice yg 

them. I think it can be shown that the 
principles of morality have their roots in 
the deepest foundations of the universe, 
that the cosmic process is ethical in the 
profoundest sense, that in that far-off morn- 
ing of the world, when the stars sang to- 
gether and the sons of God shouted for 
joy, the beauty of self-sacrifice and disin- 
terested love formed the chief burden of 
the mighty theme. 



First Stages in the Genesis of Man 




ET us begin by drawing a correct 
though slight outhne sketch of 
what the cosmic process of evolu- 
tion has been. It is not strange that when 
biologists speak of evolution they should 
often or usually have in mind simply the 
modifications wrought in plants and animals 
by means of natural selection. For it was 
by calling attention to such modifications 
that Darwin discovered a true cause of the 
origin of species by physiological descent 
from allied species. Thus was demon- 
strated the fact of evolution in its most 
important province ; men of science were 
convinced that the higher forms of life are 
derived from lower forms, and the old no- 
tion of special creations was exploded once 
and forever. This was a great scientific 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 8i 

achievement, one of the greatest known to 
history, and it is therefore not strange that 
language should often be employed as if 
Evolutionism and Darwinism were synony- 
mous. Yet not only are there extensive 
regions in the doctrine of evolution about 
which Darwin knew very little, but even as 
regards the genesis of species his theory 
was never developed in his own hands so 
far as to account satisfactorily for the gen- 
esis of man. 

It must be borne in mind that while the 
natural selection of physical variations will 
go far toward explaining the characteristics 
of all the plants and all the beasts in the 
world, it remains powerless to account for 
the existence of man. Natural selection 
of physical variations might go on for a 
dozen eternities without any other visible 
result than new forms of plant and beast in 
endless and meaningless succession. The 
physical variations by which man is dis- 
tinguished from apes are not great. His 
physical relationship with the ape is closer 



82 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

than that between cat and dog, which be- 
long to different famihes of the same order ; 
it is more like that between cat and leopard, 
or between dog and fox, different genera in 
the same family. But the moment we con- 
sider the minds of man and ape, the gap 
between the two is immeasurable. Mr. 
Mivart has truly said that, with regard to 
their total value in nature, the difference 
between man and ape transcends the dif- 
ference between ape and blade of grass. I 
should be disposed to go further and say, 
that while for zoological man you can hardly 
erect a distinct family from that of the 
chimpanzee and orang, on the other hand, 
for psychological man you must erect a dis- 
tinct kingdom ; nay, you must even dichot- 
omize the universe, putting Man on one 
side and all things else on the other. How 
can this overwhelming contrast between 
psychical and physical difference be ac- 
counted for.? The clue was furnished by 
Alfred Russel Wallace, the illustrious co- 
discoverer of natural selection. Walla*ce 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 8) 

saw that along with the general develop- 
ment of mammalian intelligence a point 
must have been reached in the history of 
one of the primates, when variations of in- 
telligence were more profitable to him than 
variations in body. From that time forth 
that primate's intelligence went on by slow 
increments acquiring new capacity, while 
his body changed but little. When once 
he could strike fire, and chip a flint, and 
use a club, and strip off the bear's hide to 
cover himself, there was clearly no further 
use in thickening his own hide, or length- 
ening and sharpening his claws. Natural 
selection is the keenest capitalist in the 
universe ; she never loses an instant in 
seizing the most profitable place for invest- 
ment, and her judgment is never at fault. 
Forthwith, for a million years or more she 
invested all her capital in the psychical 
variations of this favoured primate, making 
little change in his body except so far as to 
aid in the general result, until by and by 
something like human intelligence of a low 



84 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

grade, like that of the AustraHan or the 
Andaman islander, was achieved. The 
genesis of humanity was by no means yet 
completed, but an enormous gulf had been 
crossed. 

After throwing out this luminous sugges- 
tion Mr. Wallace never followed it up as it 
admitted and deserved. It is too much to 
expect one man to do everything, and his 
splendid studies in the geographical distri- 
bution of organisms may well have left him 
little time for work in this direction. Who 
can fail to see that the selection of psy- 
chical variations, to the comparative neg- 
lect of physical variations, was the opening 
of a new and greater act in the drama of 
creation } Since that new departure the 
Creator s highest work has consisted not 
in bringing forth new types of body, but in 
expanding and perfecting the psychical at- 
tributes of the one creature in whose life 
those attributes have begun to acquire pre- 
dominance. Along this human line of as- 
cent there is no occasion for any further 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 8^ 

genesis of species, all future progress must 
continue to be not zoological, but psycho- 
logical, organic evolution gives place to 
civilization. Thus in the long series of 
organic beings Man is the last ; the cosmic 
process, having once evolved this master- 
piece, could thenceforth do nothing better 
than to perfect him. 



VI 



The Central Fact in the Genesis' of Man 



HIS conclusion, which follows irre- 
sistibly from Wallace's theorem, 
that in the genesis of Humanity 
natural selection began to follow a new 
path, already throws a light of promise over 
our whole subject, like the rosy dawn of a 
June morning. But the explanation of the 
genesis of Humanity is still far from com- 
plete. If we compare man with any of the 
higher mammals, such as dogs and horses 
and apes, we are struck with several points 
of difference : firsts the greater progressive- 
ness of man, the widening of the interval 
by which one generation may vary from its 
predecessor ; secondly y the definite grouping 
in societies based on more or less perma- 
nent family relationships, instead of the in- 
definite grouping in miscellaneous herds or 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 8y 

packs ; thirdly ^ the possession of articulate 
speech ; foicrthly, the enormous increase in 
the duration of infancy, or the period when 
parental care is needed. Twenty-four years 
ago, in a course of lectures given yonder in 
Holden Chapel, I showed that the circum- 
stance last named is the fundamental one, 
and the others are derivative. It is the 
prolonged infancy that has caused the pro- 
gressiveness and the grouping into definite 
societies, while the development of language 
was a consequence of the increasing intelli- 
gence and sociality thus caused. In the 
genesis of Humanity the central fact has 
been the increased duration of infancy. 
Now, can we assign for that increased dura- 
tion an adequate cause } I think we can. 
The increase of intelligence is itself such a 
cause. A glance at the animal kingdom 
shows us no such thing as infancy among 
the lower orders. It is with warm-blooded 
birds and mammals that the phenomena 
of infancy and the correlative parental care 
really begin. 



VII 




The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened 
Infancy 

|HE reason for this is that any crea- 
ture's ability to perceive and to 
act depends upon the registration 
of experiences in his nerve-centres. It is 
either individual or ancestral experience that 
is thus registered ; or, strictly speaking, it 
is both. It is of the first importance that 
this point should be clearly understood, and 
therefore a few words of elementary ex- 
planation will not be superfluous. 

When you learn to play the piano, you 
gradually establish innumerable associations 
between printed groups of notes and the 
corresponding keys on the key-board, and 
you also train the fingers to execute a vast 
number of rapid and complicated motions. 
The process is full of difficulty, and involves 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 8g 

endless repetition. After some years per- 
haps you can play at sight and with almost 
automatic ease a polonaise of Liszt or a 
ballad of Chopin. Now this result is pos- 
sible only because of a bodily change which 
has taken place in you. Countless molec- 
ular alterations have been wrought in the 
structure of sundry nerves and muscles, 
especially in the gray matter of sundry gan- 
glia, or nerve-centres. Every ganglion con- 
cerned in the needful adjustments of eyes 
and fingers and wrists, or in the perception 
of musical sounds, has undergone a change 
more or less profound. The nature of the 
change is largely a matter of speculation ; 
but that point need not in any way concern 
us. It is enough for us to know that there 
is such a change, and that it is a registra- 
tion of experiences. The pianist has regis- 
tered in the intimate structure of his ner- 
vous system a world of experiences entirely 
foreign to persons unfamiliar with the piano ; 
and upon this registration his capacity de- 
pends. 



go Love and Self-Sacrifice 

Now the same explanation applies to all 
bodily movements whatever, whether com- 
plicated or simple. In writing, in walking, 
in talking, we are making use of nervous 
registrations that have been brought about 
by an accumulation of experiences. To pick 
up a pencil from the table may seem a very 
simple act, yet a baby cannot do it. It has 
been made possible only by the education 
of the eyes, of the muscles that move the 
eyes, of the arm and hand, and of the nerve- 
centres that coordinate one group of move- 
ments with another. All this multiform 
education has consisted in a gradual regis- 
tration of experiences. In like manner all 
the actions of man upon the world about 
him are made up of movements, and every 
such movement becomes possible only when 
a registration is effected in sundry nerve- 
centres. 

But this is not the whole story. The 
case is undoubtedly the same with those 
visceral movements, involuntary and in 
great part unconscious, which sustain life ; 



Love and Self-Sacrifice gi 

the beating of the heart, the expansion and 
contraction of the lungs, the slight changes 
of '^alibre in the blood-vessels, even the 
moveirjf^nt3 of secretion that take place in 
glands. All these actions are governed by 
nerves, and these nerves have had to be 
educated to their work. This education has 
been a registration of experiences chiefly 
ancestral, throughout an enormous past, 
practically since the beginnings of verte- 
brate life. 

With the earlier and simpler forms of ani- 
mal existence these visceral movements are 
the only ones, or almost the only ones, that 
have to be made. Presently the movements 
of limbs and sense organs come to be added, 
and as we rise in the animal scale, these 
movements come to be endlessly various and 
complex, and by and by implicate the ner- 
vous system more and more deeply in com- 
plex acts of perception, memory, reasoning, 
and volition. Obviously, therefore, in the 
development of the individual organism 
the demands of the nervous system upon 



g2 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

the vital energies concerned in growth must 
come to be of paramount importance, and 
in providing for them the entire embryonic 
life must be most profoundly and variously 
affected. Though we may be unable to 
follow the processes in detail, the truth of 
this general statement is plain and undeni- 
able. 

I say, then, that when a creature's intelli- 
gence is low, and its experience very meagre, 
consisting of a few simple perceptions and 
acts that occur throughout life with mono- 
tonous regularity, all the registration of this 
experience gets effected in the nerve-centres 
of its offspring before birth, and they come 
into the world fully equipped for the battle 
of life, like the snapping turtle, which snaps 
with decisive vigour as soon as it emerges 
from the Q;gg, Nothing is left plastic to be 
finished after birth, and so the life of each 
generation is almost an exact repetition of 
its predecessor. But when a creature's in- 
telligence is high, and its experience varied 
and complicated, the registration of all this 



Love and Self-Sacrifice g^ 

experience in the nerve-centres of its off- 
spring does not get accomplished before 
birth. There is not time enough. The 
most important registrations, such as those 
needed for breathing and swallowing and 
other indispensable acts, are fully effected ; 
others, such as those needed for handling 
and walking, are but partially effected ; 
others, such as those involved in the recog- 
nition of creatures not important as ene- 
mies or prey, are left still further from 
completion. Much is left to be done by 
individual experience after birth. The ani- 
mal, when first born, is a baby dependent 
upon its mother's care. At the same time 
its intelligence is far more plastic, and it 
remains far more teachable, than the lower 
animal that has no babyhood. Dogs and 
horses, lions and elephants, often increase 
in sagacity until late in life ; and so do 
apes, which, along with a higher intelligence 
than any other dumb animals, have a much 
longer babyhood. 

We are now prepared to appreciate the 



g4 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

marvellous beauty of Nature's work in bring- 
ing Man upon the scene. Nowhere is there 
any breach of continuity in the cosmic pro- 
cess. First we have natural selection at 
work throughout the organic world, bring- 
ing forth millions of species of plant and 
animal, seizing upon every advantage, phy- 
sical or mental, that enables any species 
to survive in the universal struggle. So 
far as any outward observer, back in the 
Cretaceous or early Eocene periods, could 
surmise, this sort of confusion might go on 
forever. But all at once, perhaps some- 
where in the upper Eocene or lower Mio- 
cene, it appears that among the primates, 
a newly developing family already distin- 
guished for prehensile capabilities, one 
genus is beginning to sustain itself more 
by mental craft and shiftiness than by any 
physical characteristic. Forthwith does 
natural selection seize upon any and every 
advantageous variation in this craft and 
shiftiness, until this favoured genus of pri- 
mates, this Homo AlaluSy or speechless 



Love and Self-Sacrifice g^ 

man, as we may call him, becomes pre- 
eminent for sagacity, as the mammoth is 
preeminent for bulk, or the giraffe for 
leno:th of neck. 



VIII 



Some of its Effects 




N doing this, natural selection has 
unlocked a door and let in a new 
set of causal agencies. As Homo 
Alalus grows in intelligence and variety of 
experience, his helpless babyhood becomes 
gradually prolonged, and passes not into 
sudden maturity, but into a more or less 
plastic intermediate period of youth. In- 
dividual experience, as contrasted with an- 
cestral experience, counts for much more 
than ever before in shaping his actions, and 
thus he begins to become progressive. He 
can learn many more new ways of doing 
things in a hundred thousand years than 
any other creature could have done in a 
much longer time. Thus the rate of pro- 
gress is enhanced, the increasing intelli- 
gence of Homo Alalus further lengthens 



Love and Self-Sacrifice gy 

his plastic period of life, and this in turn 
further increases his intelligence and em- 
phasizes his individuality. The evidence is 
abundant that Homo Alalus, like his simian 
cousins, was a gregarious creature, and it 
is not difficult to see how, with increasing 
intelligence, the gestures and grunts used 
in the horde for signalling must come to be 
clothed with added associations of meaning, 
must gradually become generalized as signs 
of conceptions. This invention of spoken 
language, the first invention of nascent 
humanity, remains to this day its most 
fruitful invention. Henceforth ancestral 
experience could not simply be transmitted 
through its inheritable impress upon the 
nervous system, but its facts and lessons 
could become external materials and instru- 
ments of education. Then the children of 
Homo Alalus, no longer speechless, began 
to accumulate a fund of tradition, which in 
the fulness of time was to bloom forth in 
history and poetry, in science and theology. 
From the outset the acquisition of speech 



g8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

must greatly have increased the rate of 
progress, and enhanced the rudimentary 
sociaUty. 

With the lengthening of infancy the pe- 
riod of maternal help and watchfulness 
must have lengthened in correspondence. 
Natural selection must keep those two 
things nicely balanced, or the species would 
soon become extinct. But Homo Alalus 
had not only a mother, but brethren and 
sisters ; and when the period of infancy be- 
came sufficiently long, there were a series 
of Homunculi Alali, the eldest of whom 
still needed more or less care while the 
third and the fourth were arriving upon 
the scene. In this way the sentiment of 
maternity became abiding. The cow has 
strong feelings of maternal affection for 
periods of a few weeks at a time, but lapses 
into indifference and probably cannot dis- 
tinguish her grown-up calves as sustaining 
any nearer relation to herself than other 
members of the herd. But Femina Alala, 
with her vastly enlarged intelligence, is 



Love and Self-Sacrifice gg 

called upon for the exercise of maternal 
affection until it becomes a permanent 
part of her nature. In the same group of 
circumstances begins the permanency of 
the marital relation. The warrior -hunter 
grows accustomed to defending the same 
wife and children and to helping them in 
securing food. Cases of what we may term 
wedlock, arising in this way, occur sporad- 
ically among apes ; its thorough establish- 
ment, however, was not achieved until after 
the genesis of Humanity had been com- 
pleted in most other respects. The elabo- 
rate researches of Westermarck have proved 
that permanent marriage exists even among 
savages ; it did not prevail, however, until 
the advanced stage of culture represented 
by the Aztecs in aboriginal America and 
the Neolithic peoples of ancient Europe. 
As for strict monogamy, it is a com- 
paratively late achievement of civilization. 
What the increased and multiplied dura- 
tion of infancy at first accomplished was 
the transformation of miscellaneous hordes 



loo Love and Self-Sacrifice 

of Homines Alali into organized clans re- 
cognizing kinship through the mother, as 
exemplified among nearly all American 
Indians when observed by Europeans. 

Thus by gradual stages we have passed 
from four-footed existence into Human So- 
ciety, and once more I would emphasize 
the fact that nowhere do we find any breach 
of continuity, but one factor sets another 
in operation, which in turn reacts upon the 
first, and so on in a marvellously harmo- 
nious consensus. Surely if there is any- 
where in the universe a story. matchless for 
its romantic interest, it is the story of the 
genesis of Man, now that we are at length 
beginning to be able to decipher it. We 
see that there is a good deal more in it 
than mere natural selection. At bottom, 
indeed, it is all a process of survival of the 
fittest, but the secondary agencies we have 
been considering have brought us to a point 
where our conception of the Struggle for 
Life must be enlarged. Out of the mani- 
fold compounding and recompounding of 



Love and Self-Sacrifice loi 

primordial clans have come the nations of 
mankind in various degrees of civilization, 
but already in the clan we find the ethical 
process at work. The clan has a code of 
morals well adapted to the conditions amid 
which it exists. There is an ethical senti- 
ment in the clan ; its members have duties 
toward it ; it punishes sundry acts even 
with death, and rewards or extols sundry 
other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical 
atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless, 
as compared with that of a modern Chris- 
tian homestead, but still unquestionably 
ethical. 



IX 




Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments 

|0W, here at last, in encountering 
the ethical process at work, have 
we detected a breach of continu- 
ity ? Has the moral sentiment been flung 
in from outside, or is it a natural result of 
the cosmic process we have been sketch- 
ing ? Clearly it is the latter. There has 
been no breach of continuity. When the 
prolongation of infancy produced the clan, 
there naturally arose reciprocal necessities 
of behaviour among the members of the 
clan, its mothers and children, its hunters 
and warriors. If such reciprocal necessi- 
ties were to be disregarded the clan would 
dissolve, and dissolution would be general 
destruction. For, bear in mind, the clan, 
when once evolved, becomes the unit whose 
preservation is henceforth the permanent 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 103 

necessity. It is infancy that has made it 
so. A miscellaneous horde, with brief in- 
fancies for its younger members, may sur- 
vive a very extensive slaughter ; but in a 
clan, where the proportion of helpless chil- 
dren is much greater, and a considerable 
division of labour between nurses and war- 
riors has become established, the case is 
different. An amount of degree of calam- 
ity sufficient to break up its organization 
will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when 
Nature's travail has at length brought forth 
the clan, its requirements forthwith become 
paramount, and each member's conduct 
from babyhood must conform to them. 
Natural selection henceforth invests her 
chief capital in the enterprise of preserving 
the clan. In that primitive social unit lie 
all the potentiality and promise of Humar 
Society through untold future ages. So 
for age after age those clans in which the 
conduct of the individuals is best subordi- 
nated to the general welfare are sure to 
prevail over clans in which the subordina- 



104 ^^'^^ ^^^ Self-Sacrifice 

tion is less perfect. As the maternal in- 
stinct had been cultivated for thousands 
of generations before clanship came into 
existence, so for many succeeding ages of 
turbulence the patriotic instinct, which 
prompts to the defence of home, was culti- 
vated under penalty of death. Clans de- 
fended by weakly loyal or cowardly war- 
riors were sure to perish. Unflinching 
bravery and devoted patriotism were virtues 
necessary to the survival of the community, 
and were thus preserved until at the dawn 
of historic times, in the most grandly mili- 
tant of clan societies, we find the word 
virtus connoting just these qualities, and 
no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open 
in the forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps 
into it, that the commonwealth may be 
preserved from harm. 

Now the moment a man's voluntary ac- 
tions are determined by conscious or un- 
conscious reference to a standard outside 
of himself and his selfish motives, he has 
entered the world of ethics, he has begun 



Love and Self-Sacrifice lo^ 

to live in a moral atmosphere. Egoism has 
ceased to be all in all, and altruism — it is 
an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the 
only one available — altruism has begun to 
assert its claim to sovereignty. In the ear- 
lier and purely animal stages of existence 
it was right enough for each individual to 
pursue pleasure and avoid pain ; it did not 
endanger the welfare of the species, but on 
the contrary it favoured that welfare ; in its 
origin avoidance of pain was the surest 
safeguard for the perpetuation of life, and 
with due qualifications that is still the case. 
But as soon as sociality became established, 
and Nature's supreme end became the 
maintenance of the clan organization, the 
standard for the individual's conduct be- 
came shifted, permanently and forever 
shifted. Limits were interposed at which 
pleasure must be resigned and pain en- 
dured, even certain death encountered, for 
the sake of the clan ; perhaps the individ- 
ual did not always understand it in that 
way, but at all events it was for the sake 



io6 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

of some rule recognized in the clan, some 
rule which, as his mother and all his kin 
had from his earliest childhood inculcated 
upon him, oicght to be obeyed. This con- 
ception of ought, of obligation, of duty, of 
debt to something outside of self, resulted 
from the shifting of the standard of con- 
duct outside of the individual's self. Once 
thus externalized, objectivized, the ethical 
standard demanded homage from the indi- 
vidual. It furnished the rule for a higher 
life than one dictated by mere selfishness. 
Speaking after the manner of naturalists, I 
here use the phrase '' higher life '' advis- 
edly. It was the kind of life that was 
conducive to the preservation and further 
development of the highest form of animate 
existence that had been attained. (It ap- 
pears to me that we begin to find for ethics 
the most tremendous kind of sanction in 
the nature of the cosmic process/) 

A word of caution may be needed. It is 
not for a moment to be supposed that when 
primitive men began crudely shaping their 



Love and Self -Sacrifice loy 

conduct with reference to a standard out- 
side of self, they did so as the result of 
meditation, or with any realizing sense of 
what they were doing. That has never 
been the method of evolution. Its results 
steal upon the world noiselessly and unob- 
served, and only after they have long been 
with us does reason employ itself upon 
them. The wolf does not eat the lamb be- 
cause he regards a flesh diet as necessary 
to his health and activity, but because he is 
hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he 
likes lamb. It was no intellectual percep- 
tion of needs and consequences that length- 
ened the maternal instinct with primeval 
mothers as the period of infancy length- 
ened. Nor was it any such intellectual 
perception that began to enthrone *' I 
ought" in the place of "I wish." If in 
the world's recurrent crises Nature had 
waited to be served by the flickering lamp 
of reason, the story would not have been 
what it is. Her method has been, with the 
advent of a new situation, to modify the 



jo8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

existing group of instincts ; and his work 
she will not let be slighted; in her train 
follows the lictor with the symbols of death, 
and there is neither pity nor relenting. In 
the primeval warfare between clans, those 
in which the instincts were not so modified 
as to shift the standard of conduct outside 
of the individual's self must inevitably have 
succumbed and perished under the pressure 
of those in which the instincts had begun 
to experience such modification. The 
moral law grew up in the world not because 
anybody asked for it, but because it was 
needed for the world's work. If it is not a 
product of the cosmic process, it would be 
hard to find anything that could be so 
called. 



X 




The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake 
of Moral Ends 

HAVE not undertaken to make 
my outline sketch of the genesis of 
Humanity approach to complete- 
ness, but only to present enough salient 
points to make a closely connected argu- 
ment in showing how morality is evolved in 
the cosmic process and sanctioned by it. 
In a more complete sketch it would be 
necessary to say something about the gen- 
esis of Religion. One of the most inter- 
esting, and in my opinion one of the most 
profoundly significant, facts in the whole 
process of evolution is the first appearance 
of religious sentiment at very nearly the 
same stage at which the moral law began to 
grow up. To the differential attributes of 
Humanity already considered there needs 



no Love and Self-Sacrifics 

to be added the possession of religious sen- 
timent and religious ideas. We may safely 
say that this is the most important of all 
the distinctions between Man and other 
animals ; for to say so is simply to epito- 
mize the whole of human experience as re- 
corded in history, art, and literature. Along 
with the rise from gregariousness to incipi- 
ent sociality, along with the first stammer- 
ings of articulate speech, along with the 
dawning discrimination between right and 
wrong, came the earliest feeble groping 
toward a world beyond that which greets 
the senses, the first dim recognition of the 
Spiritual Power that is revealed in and 
through the visible and palpable realm of 
nature. And universally since that time 
the notion of Ethics has been inseparably 
associated with the notion of Religion, and 
the sanction for Ethics has been held to be 
closely related with the world beyond phe- 
nomena. There are philosophers who 
maintain that with the further progress of 
enlightenment this close relation will cease 



Love and SelfSacriJice r 1 1 

to be asserted, that Ethics will be divorced 
from Religion, and that the groping of the 
Human Soul after its God will be condemned 
as a mere survival from the errors of primi- 
tive savagery, a vain and idle reaching out 
toward a world of mere phantoms. I men- 
tion this opinion merely to express unquali- 
fied and total dissent from it. I believe it 
can be shown that one of the strongest 
implications of the doctrine of evolution is 
the Everlasting Reality of Religion. 

But we have not time at present for enter- 
ing upon so vast a subject. Let this refer- 
ence suffice to show that it has not been 
passed over or forgotten in my theory of 
the genesis of Humanity. In an account 
of the evolution of the religious sentiment, 
its first appearance as coeval, or nearly so, 
with the beginnings of the ethical process 
would assume great importance. We have 
here been concerned purely with the ethi- 
cal process itself, which we have found to 
be — as Huxley truly says in his footnote 
— part and parcel of the general process 



112 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

of evolution. Our historical survey of the 
genesis of Humanity seems to show very 
forcibly that a society of Human Souls 
living in conformity to a perfect Moral Law 
is the end toward which, ever since the 
time when our solar system was a patch of 
nebulous vapour, the cosmic process has 
been aiming. After our cooling planet had 
become the seat of organic life, the process 
of natural selection went on for long ages 
seemingly, but not really at random ; for 
our retrospect shows that its ultimate ten- 
dency was towards singling out one crea- 
ture and exalting his intelligence. 

Now we have seen that this increase of in- 
telligence itself, by entailing upon Man the 
helplessness of infancy, led directly to the 
production of those social conditions that 
c-alled the ethical process into play and set 
it actively to work. Thus we may see the 
absurdity of trying to separate the moral 
nature of Man from the rest of his nature, 
and to assign for it a separate and inde- 
pendent history. The essential solidarity 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 1 1 ^ 

in the cosmic process will admit of no 
such fanciful detachment of one part from 
another. All parts are involved one in 
another. Again, the ethical process is not 
only part and parcel of the cosmic process, 
but it is its crown and consummation. 
Toward the spiritual perfection of Hu- 
manity the stupendous momentum of the 
cosmic process has all along been tending. 
That spiritual perfection is the true goal of 
evolution, the divine end that was involved 
in the beginning. When Huxley asks us to 
believe that *^the cosmic process has no 
sort of relation to moral ends,*' I feel like 
replying with the question, " Does not the 
cosmic process exist purely for the sake of 
moral ends .^ " Subtract from the universe 
its ethical meaning, and nothing remains 
but an unreal phantom, the figment of false 
metaphysics. 

We have now arrived at a position from 
which a glimmer of light is thrown upon 
some of the dark problems connected with 
the moral government of the world. We 



114 ^ove and Self-Sacrifice 

can begin to see why misery and wrong- 
doing are permitted to exist, and why the 
creative energy advances by such slow and 
tortuous methods toward the fulfilment of 
its divine purpose. In order to understand 
these things, we must ask. What is the 
ultimate goal of the ethical process ? Ac- 
cording to the utilitarian philosophy that 
goal is the completion of human happiness. 
But this interpretation soon refutes itself. 
A world of completed happiness might well 
be a world of quiescence, of stagnation, of 
automatism, of blankness ; the dynamics of 
evolution would have no place in it. But 
suppose we say that the ultimate goal of 
the ethical process is the perfecting of hu- 
man character } This form of statement 
contains far more than the other. Con- 
summation of happiness is a natural out- 
come of the perfecting of character, but 
that perfecting can be achieved only through 
struggle, through discipline, through resist- 
ance. It is for him that overcometh that 
the crown of life is reserved. The con- 



Love andf Self-Sacrifice 1 1 5 

summate product of a world of evolution is 
the character that creates happiness, that is 
replete with dynamic possibilities of fresh 
life and activity in directions forever new. 
Such a character is the reflected image of 
God, and in it are contained the promise 
and potency of life everlasting. 

No such character could be produced by 
any act of special creation in a garden of 
Eden. It must be the consummate efflores- 
cence of long ages of evolution, and a world 
of evolution is necessarily characterized by 
slow processes, many of which to a looker- 
on seem like tentative experiments, with an 
enormous sacrifice of ephemeral forms of 
life. Thus while the Earth Spirit goes on, 
unhasting, yet unresting, weaving in the 
loom of Time the visible garment of God, 
we begin to see that even what look like 
failures and blemishes have been from the 
outset involved in the accomplishment of 
the all-wise and all-holy purpose, the per- 
fecting of the spiritual Man in the likeness 
of his Heavenly Father. 



1 16 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

These points will receive further indi- 
rect illustration as we complete our outline 
sketch of the cosmic process in the past. It 
is self-evident that in the production of an 
ethical character, altruistic feelings and im- 
pulses must cooperate. Let us look, then, 
for some of the beginnings of altruism in 
the course of the evolution of life. 



XI 




Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism 

ROM an early period of the life- 
history of our planet, the preserva- 
tion of the species had obviously 
become quite as imperative an end as the 
preservation of individuals ; one is at first 
inclined to say more imperative, but if we 
pause long enough to remember that total 
failure to preserve individuals would be 
equivalent to immediate extinction of the 
species, we see that the one requirement is 
as indispensable as the other. Individuals 
must be preserved, and the struggle for 
life is between them ; species must be pre- 
served, and in the rivalry those have the 
best chance in which the offspring are 
either most redundant in numbers or are 
best cared for. In plants and animals of all 
but the higher types, the offspring are spores 



/ 1 8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

or seeds, larvae or spawn, or self-maturing 
eggs. In the absence of parental care the 
persistence of the species is ensured by the 
enormous number of such offspring. A 
single codfish, in a single season, will lay 
six million eggs, nearly all of which perish, 
of course, or else in a few years the ocean 
could not hold all the codfishes. But the 
princess in the Arabian tale, who fought 
with the malignant Jinni, could not for her 
life pick up all the scattered seeds of the 
pomegranate ; and in like manner of the 
codfish eggs, one in a million or so escapes 
and the species is maintained. But in 
the highest types of animal life in birds 
and mammals — with their four-chambered 
hearts, completely arterialized blood, and 
enhanced consciousness — parental care be- 
comes effective in protecting the offspring, 
and the excessive production diminishes. 
With birds, the necessity of maintaining a 
high temperature for the eggs leads to the 
building of nests, to a division of labour in 
the securing of food, to the development of 



Love and Self-Sacrifice i ig 

a temporary maternal instinct, and to con- 
jugal alliances which in some birds last for 
a lifetime. As the eggs become effectively 
guarded the number diminishes, till instead 
of millions there are half a dozen. When 
it comes to her more valuable products. 
Nature is not such a reckless squanderer 
after all. So with mammals, for the most 
part the young are in litters of half a dozen 
or so ; but in Man, with his prolonged and 
costly infancy parental care reaches its 
highest development and concentration in 
rearing children one by one. 

From the dawn of life, I need hardly say, 
all the instincts that have contributed to 
the preservation of offspring must have 
been favoured and cultivated by natural 
selection, and in many cases even in types 
of life very remote from Humanity, such 
instincts have prompted to very different 
actions from such as would flow from the 
mere instinct of self-preservation. If you 
thrust your walking-stick into an ant-heap, 
and watch the wild hurry and confusion that 



120 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

ensues when part of the interior is laid 
bare, you will see that all the workers are 
busy in moving the larvae into places of 
safety. It is not exactly a maternal in- 
stinct, for the workers are not mothers, but 
it is an altruistic instinct involving acts of 
self-devotion. So in the case of fish that 
ascend rivers or bays at spawning time, the 
actions of the whole shoal are determined 
by a temporarily predominant instinct that 
tends towards an altruistic result. In these 
and lower grades of life there is already 
something at work besides the mere strug- 
gle for life between individuals ; there is 
something more than mere contention and 
slaughter ; there is the effort towards cher- 
ishing another life than one's own. In 
these regions of animate existence we 
catch glimpses of the cosmic roots of love 
and self-sacrifice. For the simplest and 
rudest productions of Nature mere egoism 
might suffice, but to the achievement of 
any higher aim some adumbration of altru- 
ism was indispensable. 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 121 

Before such divine things as love and 
self-sacrifice could spring up from their 
cosmic roots and put forth their eflflores- 
cence, it was necessary that conscious per- 
sonal relations should become established 
between mother and infant. We have al- 
ready observed the critical importance of 
these relations in the earliest stages of 
the evolution of human society. We may 
now add that the relation between mother 
and child must have furnished the first 
occasion for the sustained and regular de- 
velopment of the altruistic feelings. The 
capacity for unselfish devotion called forth 
in that relation could afterward be utilized 
in the conduct of individuals not thus re- 
lated to one another. 

Of all kinds of altruism the mother s was 
no doubt the earliest ; it was the derivative 
source from which all other kinds were by 
slow degrees developed. In the evolution 
of these altruistic feelings, therefore, — 
feelings which are an absolutely indispen- 
sable constituent in the process of ethical 



122 Love and Self 'Sacrifice 

development, — the first appearance of real 
maternity was an epoch of most profound 
interest and importance in the history of 
life upon the earth. 

Now maternity, in the true and full sense 
of the word, is something which was not 
realized until a comparatively recent stage of 
the earth's history. God's highest work is 
never perfected save in the fulness of time. 
For countless ages there were parents and 
offspring before the slow but never aimless 
or wanton cosmic process had brought into 
existence the conscious personal relation- 
ship between mother and child. Protection 
of eggs and larvae scarcely suffices for the 
evolution of true maternity ; the relation 
of moth to caterpillar is certainly very far 
from being a prototype of it. What spec- 
tacle could be more dreary than that of 
the Jurassic period, with its lords of crea- 
tion, the oviparous dinosaurs, crawling or 
bounding over the land, splashing amid the 
mighty waters, whizzing bat-like through 
the air, horrible brutes innumerable, with 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 12^ 

bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse 
in fibre, and cold-blooded. 

" Dragons of the prime, 
That tare each other in their slime." 

The remnants of that far-off dismal age 
have been left behind in great abundance, 
and from them we can easily reconstruct 
the loathsome picture of a world of domi- 
nating egoism, whose redemption through 
the evolution of true maternity had not 
yet effectively begun. For such a world 
might Caliban's theology indeed seem fitted. 
Nearly nine tenths of our planet's past life- 
history, measured in duration, had passed 
away without achieving any higher result 
than this, — a fact which for impatient re- 
formers may have in it some crumbs of 
consolation. 

For, though the mills of God grind slowly, 
the cosmic process was aiming at something 
better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at 
some time during the long period of the 
Chalk deposits there began the tremendous 
world-wide rivalry between these dragons 



124 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

and the rising class of warm-blooded vivip- 
arous mammals which had hitherto played 
an insignificant part in the world. The 
very name of this class of animals is taken 
from the function of motherhood. The off- 
spring of these "mammas" come into the 
world as recognizable personalities, so far 
developed that the relation between mother 
and child begins as a relation of personal 
affection. The new-born mammal is not 
an egg nor a caterpillar, but a baby, and 
the baby's dawning consciousness opens up 
a narrow horizon of sympathy and tender- 
ness, a horizon of which the expansion shall 
in due course of ages reveal a new heaven 
and a new earth. At first the nascent al- 
truism was crude enough, but it must have 
sufficed to make mutual understanding and 
cooperation more possible than before; it 
thus contributed to the advancement of 
, mammalian intelligence, and prepared the 
way for gregariousness, by and by to cul- 
minate in sociality, as already described. 
In the history of creation the mammals 



Love and Self-Sacrifice 12^ 

were moderns, equipped with more effec- 
tive means of ensuring survival than their 
oviparous antagonists. The development of 
complete mammality was no sudden thing. 
Some of the dinosaurs may have been ovo- 
viviparous, like some modern serpents. 
The Australian duck-bill, a relic of the 
most ancient incipient mammality, is still 
oviparous ; the opossum and kangaroo pre- 
serve the record of a stage when vivipa- 
rousness was but partially achieved ; but 
with the advent of the placental mammals 
the break with the old order of things was 
complete. 

The results of the struggle are registered 
in the Eocene rocks. The ancient world 
had found its Waterloo. Gone were the 
dragons who so long had lorded it over 
both hemispheres, — brontosaurs, iguano- 
dons, plesiosaurs, laelaps, pterodactyls, — 
all gone ; their uncouth brood quite van- 
ished from the earth, and nothing left alive 
as a reminder, save a few degenerate col- 
lateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles, 



126 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

objects of dread and loathing to higher 
creatures. Never in the history of our 
planet has there been a more sweeping 
victory than that of the mammals, nor has 
Nature had any further occasion for vic- 
tories of that sort. The mammal remains 
the highest type of animal existence, and 
subsequent progress has been shown in 
the perfecting of that type where most per- 
fectible. 




XII 

The Omnipresent Ethical Trend 

g'lTH the evolution of true maternity 
Nature was ready to proceed to her 
highest grades of work. Intelli- 
gence was next to be lifted to higher levels, 
and the order of mammals with greatest 
prehensile capacities, the primates with 
their incipient hands, were the most favour- 
able subjects in which to carry on this pro- 
cess. The later stages of the marvellous 
story we have already passed in review. 
We have seen the accumulating intelligence 
lengthen the period of infancy, and thus 
prolong the relations of loving sympathy 
between mother and child ; we have seen 
the human family and human society thus 
brought into existence ; and along therewith 
we have recognized the necessity laid upon 
each individual for conforming his conduct 



128 Love and Self-Sacrifice 

to a standard external to himself. At this 
point, without encountering any breach of 
continuity in the cosmic process, we crossed 
the threshold of the ethical world, and en- 
tered a region where civilization, or the 
gradual perfecting of the spiritual qualities, 
is henceforth Nature's paramount aim. To 
penetrate further into this region would be 
to follow the progress of civilization, while 
the primitive canoe develops into the Cunard 
steamship, the hieroglyphic battle-sketch 
into epics and dramas, sun-catcher myths 
into the Newtonian astronomy, wandering 
tribes into mighty nations, the ethics of the 
clan into the moral law for all men. The 
story shows us Man becoming more and 
more clearly the image of God, exercising 
creative attributes, transforming his physi- 
cal environment, incarnating his thoughts 
in visible and tangible shapes all over the 
world, and extorting from the abysses of 
space the secrets of vanished ages. From 
lowly beginnings, without breach of contin- 
uity, and through the cumulative action of 



Love and Self-Sacrifice I2g 

minute and inconspicuous causes, the resist- 
less momentum of cosmic events has tended 
toward such kind of consummation ; and 
part and parcel of the whole process, in- 
separably wrapped up with every other part, 
has been the evolution of the sentiments 
which tend to subordinate mere egoism to 
unselfish and moral ends. 

A narrow or partial survey might fail to 
make clear the solidarity of the cosmic pro- 
cess. But the history of creation, when 
broadly and patiently considered, brings 
home to us with fresh emphasis the pro- 
found truth of what Emerson once said, that 
*' the lesson of life ... is to believe what 
the years and the centuries say against the 
hours ; to resist the usurpation of partic- 
ulars ; to penetrate to their catholic sense.'' 
When we have learned this lesson, our mis- 
givings vanish, and we breathe a clear atmo- 
sphere of faith. Though in many ways God's 
work is above our comprehension, yet those 
parts of the world's story that we can de- 
cipher well warrant the belief that while in 



i^o Love and Self-Sacrifice 

Nature there may be divine irony, there can 
be no such thing as wanton mockery, for 
profoundly underlying the surface entangle- 
ment of her actions we may discern the 
omnipresent ethical trend. The moral sen- 
timents, the moral law, devotion to unself- 
ish ends, disinterested love, nobility of 
soul, — these are Nature's most highly 
wrought products, latest in coming to ma- 
turity ; they are the consummation, toward 
which all earlier prophecy has pointed. 
We are right, then, in greeting the rejuve- 
nescent summer with devout faith and hope. 
Below the surface din and clashing of the 
struggle for life we hear the undertone of 
the deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in 
solemn music through the ages, its volume 
swelled by every victory, great or small, of 
right over wrong, till in the fulness of time, 
in God's own time, it shall burst forth in 
the triumphant chorus of Humanity purified 
and redeemed. 



THE EVERLASTING REALITY 
OF RELIGION 



Here sits he shaping wings to fly ; 
His heart forebodes a mystery : 
He names the name Eternity. 

That type of Perfect in his mind 
In Nature can he nowhere find, 
He sows himself on every wind. 

He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, 
And through thick veils to apprehend 
A labour working to an end. 

Tennyson, The Two Voices, 



c 



''Deo erexit Voltaire** 



HE visitor to Geneva whose studies 
have made him duly acquainted 
with the most interesting human 
personality of all that are associated with 
that historic city will never leave the place 
without making a pilgrimage to the chateau 
of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural 
homestead things still remain very much as 
on the day when the aged Voltaire left it 
for the last visit to Paris, where his long 
life was worthily ended amid words and 
deeds of affectionate homage. One may 
sit down at the table where was written the 
most perfect prose, perhaps, that ever flowed 
from pen, and look about the little room 
with its evidences of plain living and high 
thinking, until one seems to recall the eccen- 
tric figure of the vanished Master, with his 



1^4 Reality of Religion 

flashes of shrewd wisdom and caustic wit, 
his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his con- 
suming hatred of bigotry and oppression, 
his merciless contempt for shams, his bound- 
less enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll 
in the park, that quaint presence goes along 
with us till all at once in a shady walk we 
come upon something highly significant and 
characteristic, the little parish church with 
its Latin inscription over the portal, Deo 
erexit Voltaire^ i. e. "Voltaire built it for 
God," and as we muse upon it, the piercing 
eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile 
seem still to follow us. What meant this 
eccentric inscription } 

When Voltaire became possessor of the 
manor of Ferney, the church was badly out 
of repair, and stood where it obstructed the 
view from certain windows of the chateau. 
So he had it cleared away, and built in a 
better spot the new church that is still 
there. It was duly consecrated, and the 
Pope further hallowed it with some relics 
of ancient saints, and there for many a 



Reality of Religion i ^^ 

year the tenants and dependents of the 
manor assembled for divine service. No- 
where in France had Voltaire ever seen a 
church dedicated simply to God ; it was 
always to Our Lady of This or Saint So- 
and-so of That ; always there was some in- 
termediary between the devout soul and the 
God of its worship. Not thus should it be 
with Voltaire's church, built upon his own 
estate to minister to the spiritual needs of 
his people. It should be dedicated simply 
and without further qualification to the wor- 
ship and service of God. Furthermore, it 
was built and dedicated, not by any ecclesi- 
astical or corporate body, but by the lord of 
that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire. 
This, I say, was highly characteristic and 
significant. It gave terse and pointed ex- 
pression to Voltaire's way of looking at 
such things. Church and theology were 
ignored, and the individual soul was left 
alone with its God. The Protestant re- 
formers and other freethinkers had stopped 
far short of this. In place of an infallible 



/ ^6 Reality of Religion 

Church they had left an infalHble Book ; if 
they rejected transubstantiation, they re- 
tained as obligatory such doctrines as those 
of the incarnation and atonement ; if they 
laughed at the miracles of mediaeval saints, 
they would allow no discredit to be thrown 
upon those of the apostolic age ; in short, 
they left standing a large part, if not the 
larger part, of the supernatural edifice 
within which the religious mind of Europe 
had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire 
regarded that whole supernatural edifice as 
so much rubbish which was impeding the 
free development of the human mind, and 
ought as quickly as possible to be torn to 
pieces and cleared away. His emotions as 
well as his reason were concerned in this 
conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it 
then existed in France, was responsible for 
much atrocious injustice, and in neighbour- 
ing lands the Inquisition still existed. Ec- 
clesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of igno- 
rance, whatever tended to hold people in 
darkness and restrain them from the free 



Reality of Religion /^7 

and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire 
hated with all the intensity of which he 
was capable. He summed it all up in one 
abstract term and personified it as *' The 
Infamous," and the watchword of that life 
of tireless vigilance was " Crush the In- 
famous ! " Supernatural theology had been 
too often pressed into the service of '* The 
Infamous,'' and for supernatural theology 
Voltaire could find no place in his scheme 
of things. He lost no chance of assailing 
it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible 
by the earnestness of his purpose, until he 
came in many quarters to be regarded as 
the most inveterate antagonist the Church 
had ever known. 

Yet among the great men of letters in 
France contemporary with Voltaire, the 
most part went immeasurably farther than 
he, and went in a different direction withal, 
for they denied the reality of Religion. 
Few of them, indeed, believed in the exist- 
ence of God, or would have had anything 
to do with building a house of worship. 



1^8 Reality of Religion 

It is related of David Hume that when din- 
ing once in a party of eighteen at the house 
of Baron d'Holbach, he expressed a doubt 
as to whether any person could anywhere 
be found to avow himself dogmatically an 
atheist. " Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the 
host, " you are this moment sitting at table 
with seventeen such persons." Among 
that group of philosophers were men of 
great intelligence and lofty purpose, such 
as D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, Con- 
dorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real 
spirit of Christianity in their natures than 
could be found in half the churches of 
Christendom. The roots of their atheism 
were emotional rather than philosophical. 
It was part of the generous but rash and 
superficial impatience with which they dis- 
owned all connection whatever with a 
Church that had become subservient to so 
much that was bad. Their atheism was 
one of the fruits of the vicious policy which 
had suppressed Huguenotism in France ; it 
was an early instance of what has since 



Reality of Religion 1 59 

been often observed, that materialism and 
atheism are much more apt to flourish in 
Romanist than in Protestant countries. 
The form of rehgion which is already to 
some extent purified and rationalized awak- 
ens no such violent revulsion in free-think- 
ing minds as the form that is more heavily- 
encumbered with remnants of obsolete 
primitive thought. Moreover, the ration- 
alizing religion of Protestant countries is 
commonly found in alliance with political 
freedom. In France under the Old Regime, 
the Catholic religion was stigmatized as an 
ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of 
absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best 
minds felt their common sense shocked 
by it no less than their reason. No very 
deep thinking was done on the subject ; 
their treatment of it was in general ex- 
tremely shallow. 

The forms which religious sentiment had 
assumed in the Middle Ages had become 
unintelligible; the most highly endowed 
minds were dead to the sublimity of Gothic 



140 Reality of Religion 

architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque 
folly in Dante's poetry. They seriously 
believed that religious doctrines and eccle- 
siastical government were originally elabo- 
rate systems of fraud, devised by sagacious 
and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of 
enslaving the multitude of mankind. No 
discrimination was shown. They were as 
ready to throw away belief in God as in the 
miracles of St. Columba, and to scout at 
the notion of a future life in the same 
terms as those in which they denounced the 
forged donation of Constantine. The flip- 
pant ease with which they disposed of the 
greatest questions, in crass ignorance of the 
very nature of the problem to be solved, 
was well illustrated in the remark of the 
astronomer Lalande, that he had swept the 
entire heavens with his telescope and found 
no God there. A similar instance of missing 
the point was furnished about fifty years 
ago by the eminent physiologist Moleschott, 
when he explaimed, "No thought without 
phosphorus," and congratulated himself that 



Reality of Religion 141 

he had forever disposed of the human soul. 
I am incHned to think that those are the 
two remarks most colossal in their silliness 
that ever appeared in print. 

Very different in spirit was the acute 
reply of Laplace when reminded by Napo- 
leon that his great treatise on the dynam- 
ics of the solar system contained no 
allusion to God. *^ Sire," said Laplace, *^ I 
had no need of that hypothesis." This 
remark was profound in its truth, for it 
meant that in order to give a specific ex- 
planation of any single group of phenomena, 
it will not do to appeal to divine action, 
which is equally the source of all pheno- 
mena. Science can deal only with secon- 
dary causes. In the eighteenth century 
men of science were learning that such is 
the case ; men like Diderot and D'Alembert 
had come to realize it, and they believed 
that the logical result was atheism. This 
was because the only idea of God which 
they had ever been taught to entertain was 
the Latin idea of a God remote from the 



142 Reality of Religion 

world and manifested only through occa- 
sional interferences with the order of na- 
ture. When they dismissed this idea they 
declared themselves atheists. If they had 
been familiar with the Greek idea of God 
as immanent in the world and manifested 
at every moment through the orderly se- 
quence of its phenomena, their conclusions 
would doubtless have been very different. 

To these philosophers Voltaire's un- 
shaken theism seemed a mere bit of eccen- 
tric conservatism. But along with that 
queer and intensely independent personal- 
ity there went a stronger intellectual grasp 
and a more calm intellectual vision than 
belonged to any other Frenchman of the 
eighteenth century. In the facts of Na- 
ture, despite the lifeless piecemeal fashion 
in which they were then studied, Voltaire 
saw a rational principle at work which athe- ' 
ism could in nowise account for. To him 
the universe seemed full of evidences of 
beneficent purpose, and more than once 
he set forth with eloquence and power the 



Reality of Religion 1 4^ 

famous argument from design, which is as 
old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and which 
received its fullest development at the 
hands of Paley and the authors of the 
Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet 
another significance added to the little 
church at Ferney. Not only was it the sole 
church in France dedicated simply to God, 
and not only was its builder a layman hos- 
tile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, 
but he was almost alone among the emi- 
nent freethinkers of his age and country 
in believing in God and asserting the ever- 
lasting reality of religion. 

It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire 
as a kind of text for the present discourse ; 
for it is my purpose to show that, apart 
from all questions of revelation, the light 
of nature affords us sufficient ground for 
maintaining that religion is fundamentally 
true and must endure forever. It appears 
to me, moreover, that the materialism of 
the present day is merely a tradition handed 
down from the French writers whom Vol- 



144 Reality of Religion 

taire combated. When Moleschott made 
his silly remark about phosphorus, it was 
simply an inheritance of silliness from La- 
lande. When Haeckel tells us that the 
doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe 
in a future life, it is not because he has 
rationally deduced such a conclusion from 
the doctrine, but because he takes his opin- 
ions on such matters ready-made from Lud- 
wig Biichner, who is simply an echo of the 
eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We 
shall see that the doctrine of evolution 
has implications very different from what 
Haeckel supposes. 

But first let me observe in passing that 
in the English-speaking world there has 
never been any such divorce between ra- 
tionalism and religion as in France, and 
among the glories of English literature are 
such deeply reverent and profoundly philo- 
sophical writings as those of Hooker and 
Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jona- 
than Edwards, and in our own time of Dr. 
Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps, 



Reality of Religion 14^ 

have faith and reason been more harmo- 
niously wedded together than in the his- 
tory of English Protestantism. But the 
disturbance that affected France in the age 
of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian 
world, and every question connected with 
religion has been probed to depths of which 
the existence was scarcely suspected a cen- 
tury ago. One seldom, indeed, hears the 
frivolous mockery in which the old French 
writers dealt so freely ; that was an ebulli- 
tion of temper called forth by a tyranny 
that had come to be a social nuisance. 
The scepticism of our day is rather sad 
than frivolous ; it drags people from long 
cherished notions in spite of themselves; it 
spares but few that are active-minded ; it 
invades the church, and does not stop in 
the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit 
and preaches. There is no refuge any- 
where from this doubting and testing spirit 
of the age. In the attitude of civilized men 
towards the world in which we live, the 
change of front has been stupendous ; the 



146 Reality of Religion 

old cosmology has been overthrown in head- 
long ruin, attacks upon doctrines have mul- 
tiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures 
are overhauled and criticised, until a young 
generation grows up knowing nothing of 
the sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by 
hearsay ; for it sees everything in heaven 
and earth called upon to show its creden- 
tials. 



II 



The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God 




|]HE general effect of this intellect- 
ual movement has been to discredit 
more than ever before the Latin 
idea of God as a power outside of the course, 
of nature and occasionally interfering with 
it. In all directions the process of evolu- 
tion has been discovered, working after 
similar methods, and this has forced upon 
us the belief in the Unity of Nature. We 
are thus driven to the Greek conception of 
God as the power working in and through 
nature, without interference or infraction of 
law. The element of chance, which some 
atheists formerly admitted into their scheme 
of things, is expelled. Nobody would now 
waste his time in theorizing about a for- 
tuitous concourse of atoms. We have so 
far spelled out the history of creation as to 



148 Reality of Religion 

see that all has been done in strict accord- 
ance with law. The method has been the 
method of evolution, and the more we study- 
it the more do we discern in it intelligible 
coherence. One part of the story never 
gives the lie to another part. 

So beautiful is all this orderly coherence, 
so satisfying to some of our intellectual 
needs, that many minds are inclined to 
doubt if anything more can be said of the 
universe than that it is a Reign of Law, 
an endless aggregate of coexistences and 
sequences. When we say that one star 
attracts another star, we do not really know 
that there is any pulling in the case ; all we 
know is that a piece of cosmical matter in 
the presence of another piece of matter 
alters its space-relations in a certain speci- 
fied way. Among the coexistences and 
sequences there is an order which we can 
detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to 
maintain that this is the whole story. Such 
a state of mind, which rests satisfied with 
the mere content of observed facts, without 



Reality of Religion I4g 

seeking to trace their ultimate implications, 
is the characteristic of what Auguste Comte 
called Positivism. It is a more refined 
phase of atheism than that of the guests at 
Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are 
few ; for the impetus of modern scientific 
thought tends with overwhelming force 
towards the conception of a single First 
Cause, or Prime Mover, perpetually mani- 
fested from moment to moment in all the 
Protean changes that make up the universe. 
As I have elsewhere sought to show, this 
is practically identical with the Athanasian 
conception of the immanent Dqity.^ Mod- 
ern men of science often call this view of 
things Monism, but if questioned narrowly 
concerning the immanent First Cause, they 
reply with a general disclaimer of know- 
ledge, and thus entitle themselves to 
be called by Huxley's term " Agnostics." 
Thirty-five years ago Spencer, taking a hint 
from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase 

1 The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge, 
Boston, 1885. 



1^0 Reality of Religion 

**The Unknowable" as an equivalent for 
the immanent Deity considered per se ; but 
I always avoid that phrase, for in practice 
it invariably leads to wrong conceptions, 
and naturally, since it only expresses one 
side of the truth. If on the one hand it is 
impossible for the finite Mind to fathom 
the Infinite, on the other hand it is prac- 
tically misleading to apply the term Un- 
knowable to the Deity that is revealed in 
every pulsation of the wondrously rich and 
beautiful life of the Universe. For most 
persons no amount of explanation will pre- 
vent the use of the word Unknowable from 
seeming to remove Deity to an unapproach- 
able distance, whereas the Deity revealed 
in the process of evolution is the ever-pre- 
sent God without whom not a sparrow falls 
to the ground, and whose voice is heard in 
each whisper of conscience, even while his 
splendour dwells in the white ray from yon- 
der star that began its earthward flight 
while Abraham's shepherds vj^atched their 
flocks. It is clear that many j^ersons have 



Reality of Religion i ^i 

derived from Spencer's use of the word 
Unknowable an impression that he intends 
by means of metaphysics to refine God 
away into nothing ; whereas he no more 
cherishes any such intention than did St. 
Paul, when he asked, *^Who hath known 
the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his 
counsellor ? '' — no more than Isaiah did 
when he declared that even as the heavens 
are higher than the earth, so are Jehovah's 
ways higher than our ways and his thoughts 
than our thoughts. 



Ill 



IVeakness of Materialism 




UST here comes along the materi- 
alist and asks us some questions, 
tries to serve on us a kind of meta- 
physical writ of qtco warranto. If modern 
physics leads us inevitably to the concep- 
tion of a single infinite Power manifested 
in all the phenomena of the knowable Uni- 
verse, by what authority do we identify that 
Power with the indwelling Deity as con- 
ceived by St. Athanasius ? The Athanasian 
Deity is to some extent fashioned in Man's 
image ; he is, to say the least, like the 
psychical part of ourselves. After making 
all possible allowances for the gulf which 
separates that which is Infinite and Abso- 
lute from that which is Finite and Relative, 
an essential kinship is asserted between 
God and the Human Soul. By what au- 



Reality of Religion 75^ 

thority, our materialist will ask, do we as- 
sert any such kinship between the Human 
Soul and the Power which modern physics 
reveals as active throughout the universe ? 
Is it not going far beyond our knowledge 
to assert any such kinship ? And would it 
not be more modest and becoming in us to 
simply designate this ever active universal 
Power by some purely scientific term, such 
as Force ? 

This argument is to-day a very familiar 
one, and it wears a plausible aspect ; it is 
couched in a spirit of scientific reserve, 
which wins for it respectful consideration. 
The modest and cautious spirit of science 
has done so much for us, that it is always 
wise to give due heed to its warnings. Let 
us beware of going beyond our knowledge, 
says the materialist. We know nothing 
but phenomena as manifestations of an in- 
dwelling force ; nor have we any ground 
for supposing that there is anything psychi- 
cal, or even quasi-psychical, in the universe 
outside of the individual minds of men and 



1^4 Reality of Religion 

other animals. Moreover, continues the 
materiahst, the psychical phenomena of 
which we are conscious — reason, memory, 
emotion, volition — are but peculiarly con- 
ditioned manifestations of the same indwell- 
ing force which under other conditions ap- 
pears as light or heat or electricity. All 
such manifestations are fleeting, and be- 
yond this world of fleeting phenomena we 
have no warrant, either in science or in 
common sense, for supposing that anything 
whatever exists. This world that is cogni- 
zable through the senses is all that there 
is, and the story of it that we can decipher 
by the aid of terrestrial experience is the 
whole story; the Unseen World is a mere 
figment inherited from the untutored fancy 
of primeval man. Such is the general view 
of things which MateriaHsm urges upon 
us with the plea of scientific sobriety and 
caution ; and to many minds, as already 
observed, it wears a plausible aspect. 

Nevertheless, when subjected to criti- 
cism, this theory of things soon loses its 



Reality of Religion 755 

sober and plausible appearance and is seen 
to be eminently rash and shallow. In the 
first place, there is no such correlation or 
equivalence as is alleged between physical 
forces and the phenomena of consciousness. 
The correlations between different modes 
of motion have been proved by actual quan- 
titative measurement, and never could have 
been proved in any other way. We know, 
for example, that heat is a mode of motion ; 
the heat that will raise the temperature of 
a pound of water by one degree of Fahren- 
heit is exactly equivalent to the motion of 
y'j2 pounds falling through a distance of 
one foot. In similar wise we know that 
light, electricity, and magnetism are modes 
of motion, transferable one into another; 
and, although precise measurements have 
not been accomplished, there is no reason 
for doubting that the changes in brain tis- 
sue, which accompany each thought and 
feeling, are also modes of motion, trans- 
ferable into the other physical modes. But 
thought and feeling themselves, which can 



/ 56 Reality of Religion 

neither be weighed nor measured, do not 
admit of being resolved into modes of mo- 
tion. They do not enter into the closed 
circuit of physical transformations, but 
stand forever outside of it, and concentric 
with that segment of the circuit which 
passes through the brain. It may be that 
thought and feeling could not continue to 
exist if that physical segment of the circuit 
were taken away. It may be that they 
could. To assume that they could not is 
surely the height of rash presumption. 
The correlation of forces exhibits Mind as 
in nowise a product of Matter, but as some- 
thing in its growth and manifestations out- 
side and parallel. It is incompatible with 
the theory that the relation of the human 
soul to the body is like that of music to the 
harp ; but it is quite compatible with the 
time-honoured theory of the human soul as 
indwelling in the body and escaping from 
it at death. 

In the second place, when we come to 
the denial of all kinship between the hu- 



Reality of Religion i^y 

man soul and the Infinite Power that is 
revealed in all phenomena, the materialistic 
theory raises difficulties as great as those 
which it seeks to avoid. The difficulties 
which it wishes to avoid are those which in- 
evitably encumber the attempt to conceive 
of Deity as Personality exerting volition 
and cherishing intelligent purpose. Such 
difficulties are undeniably great ; nay, they 
are insuperable. When we speak of Intel- 
ligence and Will and Personality, we must 
use these words with the meanings in which 
experience has clothed them, or we shall 
soon find ourselves talking nonsense. The 
only intelligence we know is strictly serial 
in its nature, and is limited by the exist- 
ence of independent objects of cognition. 
What flight of analogy can bear us across 
the gulf that divides such finite intelligence 
from that unlimited Knowledge to which 
all things past and future are ever present } 
Volition, as we know it, implies alternative 
courses of action, antecedent motives, and 
resulting effort. Like intelligence, its op- 



/ 5^ Reality of Religion 

erations are serial. What, then, do we 
really mean, if we speak of omnipresent 
Volition achieving at one and the same mo- 
ment an infinite variety of ends ? So, too, 
with Personality : when we speak of per- 
sonality that is not circumscribed by limits, 
are we not using language from which all 
the meaning has evaporated ? 

Such difficulties are insurmountable. 
Words which have gained their meanings 
from finite experience of finite objects of 
thought must inevitably falter and fail 
when we seek to apply them to that which 
is Infinite. But we do not mend matters 
by employing terms taken from the inor- 
ganic world rather than from human per- 
sonality. To designate the universal Power 
by some scientific term, such as Force, does 
not help us in the least. All our experi- 
ence of force is an experience of finite 
forces antagonized by other forces. We 
can frame no conception whatever of Infi- 
nite Force comprising within itself all the 
myriad antagonistic attractions and repul- 



Reality of Religion i ^g 

sions in which the dynamic universe con- 
sists. We go beyond our knowledge when 
we speak of Infinite Force quite as much 
as we do when we speak of Infinite Person- 
ahty. Indeed, no word or phrase which we 
seek to apply to Deity can be other than 
an extremely inadequate and unsatisfactory 
symbol. From the very nature of the case 
it must always be so, and if we once under- 
stand the reason why, it need not vex or 
puzzle us. 

It is not only when we try to speculate 
about Deity that we find ourselves encom- 
passed with difficulties and are made to 
realize how very short is our mental tether 
in some directions. This world, in its com- 
monest aspects, presents many baffling pro- 
blems, of which it is sometimes wholesome 
that we should be reminded. If you look 
at a piece of iron, it seems solid ; it looks 
as if its particles must be ever)rwhere in 
contact with one another. And yet, by 
hammering, or by great pressure, or by in- 
tense cold, the piece of iron may be com- 



i6o Reality of Religion 

pressed, so that it will occupy less space 
than before. Evidently, then, its particles 
are not in contact, but are separated from 
one another by unoccupied tracts of envel- 
oping space. In point of fact, these parti- 
cles are atoms arranged after a complicated 
fashion in clusters known as molecules. 
The word atom means something that can- 
not be cut. Now,^are these iron atoms di- 
visible or indivisible "i If they are divisible, 
then what of the parts into which each one 
can be divided ; are they also divisible } 
and so on forever. But if these iron atoms 
are indivisible, how can we conceive such a 
thing } Can we imagine two sides so close 
together that no plane of cleavage could 
pass between them 1 Can we imagine co- 
hesive tenacity too great to be overcome 
by any assignable disruptive force, and 
therefore infinite "! Suppose, now, we heat 
this piece of iron to a white heat. Scien- 
tific inquiry has revealed the fact that its 
atom-clusters are floating in an ocean of 
ether, in which are also floating the atom- 



Reality of Religion i6r 

clusters of other bodies and of the air about 
us. The heating is the increase of wave 
motion in this ether, until presently a sec- 
ondary series of intensely rapid waves ap- 
pear as white light. Now this ether would 
seem to be of infinite rarity, since it does 
not affect the weight of bodies, and yet its 
wave-motions imply an elasticity far greater 
than that of coiled steel. How can we im- 
agine such powerful resilience combined 
with such extreme tena,city ? 

These are a few of the difficulties of con- 
ception in which the study of physical sci- 
ence abounds, and I cite them because it is 
wholesome for us to bear in mind that such 
difficulties are not confined to theological 
subjects. They serve to show how our 
powers of conceiving ideas are strictly lim- 
ited by the nature of our experience. The 
illustration just cited from the luminiferous 
ether simply shows how during the past 
century the study of radiant forces has in- 
troduced us to a mode of material exist- 
ence quite different from anything that had 



1 62 Reality of Religion 

formerly been known or suspected. In this 
mode of matter we find attributes united 
which all previous experience had taught 
us to regard as contradictory and incom- 
patible. Yet the facts cannot be denied ; 
hard as we may find it to frame the con- 
ception, this light-bearing substance is at 
the same time almost infinitely rare and al- 
most infinitely resilient. If such difficulties 
confront us upon the occasion of a fresh 
extension of our knowledge of the physical 
world, what must we expect when we come 
to speculate upon the nature and modes of 
existence of God ? Bearing this in mind, 
let us proceed to consider the assumption 
that the Infinite Power which is manifested 
in the universe is essentially psychical in its 
nature ; in other words, that between God 
and the Human Soul there is real kinship, 
although we may be unable to render any 
scientific account of it. Let us consider 
this assumption historically, and in the light 
of our general knowledge of Evolution. 



IV 



Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Human 
God 




T is with purpose that I use the 
word assumption. As a matter of 
history, the existence of a quasi- 
human God has always been an assumption 
or postulate. It is something which men 
have all along taken for granted. It prob- 
ably never occurred to anybody to try to 
prove the existence of such a God until it 
was doubted, and doubts on that subject 
are very modern. Omitting from the ac- 
count a few score of ingenious philosophers, 
it may be said that all mankind, the wisest 
and the simplest, have taken for granted 
the existence of a Deity, or deities, of a 
psychical nature more or less similar to 
that of Humanity. Such a postulate has 
formed a part of all human thinking from 



164 Reality of Religion 

primitive ages down to the present time. 
The forms in which it has appeared have 
been myriad in number, but all have been 
included in this same fundamental assump- 
tion. The earliest forms were those which 
we call fetishism and animism. In fetish- 
ism the wind that blows a tree down is 
endowed with personality and supposed to 
exert conscious effort ; in animism some 
ghost of a dead man is animating that gust 
of wind. In either case a conscious voli- 
tion similar to our own, but outside of us, 
is supposed to be at work. There has been 
some discussion as to whether fetishism or 
animism is the more primitive, and some 
writers would regard fetishism as a special 
case of animism ; but it is not necessary 
to my present purpose that such questions 
should be settled. The main point is this, 
that in the earliest phases of theism each 
operation of Nature was supposed to have 
some quasi-human personality behind it. 
Such phases we find among contemporary 
savages, and there is abundant evidence of 



Reality of Religion i6^ 

their former existence among peoples now 
civilized. In the course of ages there was 
a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon 
could shake the land and preside over the 
sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows tipped 
with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could 
play pranks in the summer breezes, while 
as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful 
sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olym- 
pus, gathering the rain-clouds and wielding 
the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing 
knowledge of nature was needed to convert 
such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into 
the strict Monotheism of our own time, in 
which the whole universe is the multiform 
manifestation of a single Deity that is still 
regarded as in some real and true sense 
quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has 
thus been gradually generalized, from a 
thousand local gods to one omnipresent 
God, it has been gradually stripped of its 
grosser anthropomorphic vestments. The 
tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed 
to share with his devout worshippers in the 



1 66 Reality of Religion 

cannibal banquet ; the Gods of Olympus 
made war and love, and were moved to fits 
of inextinguishable laughter. From our 
modern Monotheism such accidents of hu- 
manity are eliminated, but the notion of a 
kinship between God and man remains, and 
is rightly felt to be essential to theism. 
Take away from our notion of God the hu- 
man element, and the theism instantly van- 
ishes ; it ce^^es to be a notion of God. We 
may retain an abstract symbol to which 
we apply some such epithet as Force, or 
Energy, or Power, but there is nothing the- 
istic in this. Some ingenious philosopher 
may try to persuade us to the contrary, but 
the Human Soul knows better; it knows 
at least what it wants ; it has asked for 
Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents 
all such attempts to palm off upon it stones 
for bread. 

Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up 
his hands in dismay and cry, " Hold ! what 
matters it what the Human Soul wants } 
Are cravings, forsooth, to be made to do 



Reality of Religion i6y 

duty as reasons ? " It is proper to reply 
that we are trying to deal with this whole 
subject after the manner of the naturalist, 
which is to describe things as they exist 
and account for them as best we may. I 
say, then, that mankind have framed, and 
for long ages maintained, a notion of God 
into which there enters a human element. 
Now if it should ever be possible to abolish 
that human element, it would not be pos- 
sible to cheat mankind into accepting the 
non-human remnant of the notion as an 
equivalent of the full notion of which they 
had been deprived. Take away from our 
symbolic conception of God the human ele- 
ment, and that aspect of theism which has 
from the outset chiefly interested mankind 
is gone. 




Religions Second Postulate : the undying Hu- 
man Soul 

HAT supremely interesting aspect 
of theism belongs to it as part and 
parcel of the general belief in an 
Unseen World, in which human beings 
have an interest. The belief in the per- 
sonal continuance of the individual human 
soul after death is a very ancient one. The 
savage custom of burying utensils and 
trinkets for the use of the deceased enables 
us to trace it back into the Glacial Period. 
We may safely say that for much more 
than a hundred thousand years mankind 
have regarded themselves as personally in- 
terested in two worlds, the physical world 
which daily greets our waking senses, 
and another world, comparatively dim and 
vaguely outlined, with which the psychical 



Reality of Religion i6g 

side of humanity is more closely connected. 
The behef in the Unseen World seems to 
be coextensive with theism ; the animism 
of the lowest savages includes both. No 
race or tribe of men has ever been found 
destitute of the belief in a ghost-world. 
Now, a ghost-world implies the personal 
continuance of human beings after death, 
and it also implies identity of nature be- 
tween the ghosts of man and the indwell- 
ing spirits of sun, wind, and flood. It is 
chiefly because these ideas are so closely 
interwoven in savage thought that it is 
often so difficult to discriminate between 
fetishism and animism. These savage ideas 
are of course extremely crude in their sym- 
bolism. With the gradual civilization of 
human thinking, the refinement in the con- 
ception of the Deity is paralleled by the 
refinement in the conception of the Other 
World. From Valhalla to Dante's Para- 
dise, what an immeasurable distance the 
human mind has travelled ! In our modern 
Monotheism the assumption of kinship be- 



I JO Reality of Religion 

tween God and the Human Soul is the as- 
sumption that there is in Man a psychical 
element identical in nature with that which 
is eternal. Belief in a quasi-human God 
and belief in the Soul's immortality thus 
appear in their origin and development, as 
in their ultimate significance, to be insepa- 
rably connected. They are part and parcel 
of one and the same efflorescence of the 
human mind. Mankind has always enter- 
tained them in common, and so entertains 
them now ; and were it possible (which it 
is not) for science to disprove the Soul's 
immortality, a theism deprived of this ele- 
ment would surely never be accepted as 
an equivalent for the theism entertained 
before. The Positivist argument that the 
only worthy immortality is survival in the 
grateful remembrance of one's fellow crea- 
tures would hardly be regarded as anything 
but a travesty and trick. If the world's 
long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's 
name let them fall, but save us from the 
intellectual hypocrisy that goes about pre- 
tending we are none the poorer ! 



VI 



Religion s Third Postulate : the Ethical Sig- 
nificance of the Unseen World 




UR account of the rise and progress 
of the general belief in an Unseen 
World is, however, not yet com- 
plete. No mention has been made of an 
element which apparently has always been 
present in the belief. I mean the ethical 
element. The savage's primeval ghost- 
world is always mixed up with his childlike 
notions of what he ought to do and what 
he ought not to do. The native of Tierra 
del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm 
because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed 
some birds for specimens, furnishes an 
excellent illustration. In a tribe living 
always on the brink of starvation, any wan- 
ton sacrifice of meat must awaken the 
wrath of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities 



iy2 Reality of Religion 

who control the weather. Notions of a simi- 
lar sort are connected with the direful host 
of omens that dog the savage's footsteps 
through the world. Whatever conduct the 
necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited 
soon comes to wear the aspect of sacrilege. 
Thus inextricably intertwined from the 
moment of their first dim dawning upon the 
consciousness of nascent Humanity, have 
been the notion of Deity, the notion of an 
Unseen World, and the notions of Right 
and Wrong. In their beginnings theology 
and ethics were inseparable ; in all the vast 
historic development of religion they have 
remained inseparable. The grotesque con- 
ceptions of primitive men have given place 
to conceptions framed after wider and 
deeper experience, but the union of ethics 
with theology remains undisturbed even 
in that most refined religious philosophy 
which ventures no opinion concerning the 
happiness or misery of a future life, except 
that the seed sown here will naturally de- 
termine the fruit to be gathered hereafter. 



Reality of Religion ly^ 

All the analogies that modern knowledge 
can bring to bear upon the theory of a 
future life point to the opinion that the 
breach of physical continuity is not accom- 
panied by any breach of ethical continuity. 
Such an opinion relating to matters be- 
yond experience cannot of course be called 
scientific, but whether it be justifiable or 
not, my point is that neither in the crude 
fancies of primitive men nor in the most 
refined modern philosophy can theology 
divorce itself from ethics. Take away the 
ethical significance from our conceptions of 
the Unseen World and the quasi-human 
God, and no element of significance re- 
mains. All that was vital in theism is 
gone. 



VII 




Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an 
Eternal Reality ? 

)|E are now prepared to see what is 
involved in the ReaHty of Reli- 
gion. Speaking historically, it may 
be said that Religion has always had two 
sides : on the one side it has consisted of a 
theory, more or less elaborate, and on the 
other side it has consisted of a group of 
sentiments conformable to the theory. 
Now in all ages and in every form of Reli- 
gion, the theory has comprised three essen- 
tial elements : first, belief in Deity, as 
quasi-human ; secondly, belief in an Un- 
seen World in which human beings con- 
tinue to exist after death ; thirdly, recogni- 
tion of the ethical aspects of human life as 
related in a special and intimate sense to 
this Unseen World. These three elements 



Reality of Religion 775 

are alike indispensable. If any one of the 
three be taken away, the remnant cannot 
properly be called Religion. Is then the 
subject-matter of Religion something real 
and substantial, or is it a mere figment of 
the imagination .? Has Religion through 
all these weary centuries been dealing with 
an eternal verity, or has it been blindly 
groping after a phantom } Can that his- 
tory of the universe which we call the Doc- 
trine of Evolution be made to furnish any 
lesson that will prove helpful in answering 
this question ? We shall find, I think, that 
it does furnish such a lesson. 

But first let us remember that along with 
the three indispensable elements here spe- 
cified, every historic Religion has also con- 
tained a quantity of cosmological specula- 
tions, metaphysical doctrines, priestly rites 
and ceremonies and injunctions, and a very 
considerable part of this structure has been 
demolished by modern criticism. The de- 
struction of beliefs has been so great that 
we can hardly think it strange if some 



iy6 Reality of Religion 

critics have taken it into their heads that 
nothing can be rescued. But let us see 
what the doctrine of evolution has to say. 
Our inquiry may seem to take us very far 
afield, but that we need not mind if we 
find the answer by and by directing us 
homeward. 



VIII 




The Fundamental Aspect of Life 

OFTEN think, when working over 
my plants, of what Linnaeus once 
said of the unfolding of a blossom : 
" I saw God in His glory passing near me, 
and bowed my head in worship." The sci- 
entific aspect of the same thought has been 
put into words by Tennyson : — 

" Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower, — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is/' 

No deeper thought was ever uttered by 
poet. For in this world of plants, which 
with its magician chlorophyll conjuring 
with sunbeams is ceaselessly at work bring- 
ing life out of death, — in this quiet vege- 
table world we may find the elementary 



iy8 Reality of Religion 

principles of all life in almost visible opera- 
tion. It is one of these elementary princi- 
ples — a very simple and broad one — that 
here concerns us. 

One of the greatest contributions ever 
made to scientific knowledge is Herbert 
Spencer's profound and luminous exposi- 
tion of Life as the continuous adjustment 
of inner relations to outer relations. The 
extreme simplicity of the subject in its 
earliest illustrations is such that the stu- 
dent at first hardly suspects the wealth of 
knowledge toward which it is pointing the 
way. The most fundamental characteristic 
of living things is their response to external 
stimuli. If you come upon a dog lying by 
the roadside and are in doubt whether he 
is alive or dead, you poke him with a stick ; 
if you get no response you presently con- 
clude that it is a dead dog. So if the tree 
fails to put forth leaves in response to the 
rising vernal temperature, it is an indication 
of death. Pour water on a drooping plant, 
and it shows its life by rearing its head. 



Reality of Religion lyg 

The growth of a plant is in its ultimate 
analysis a group of motions put forth in 
adjustment to a group of physical and 
chemical conditions in the soil and atmos- 
phere. A fine illustration is the spiral dis- 
tribution of leaves about the stem, at dif- 
ferent angular intervals in different kinds of 
plants, but always so arranged as to ensure 
the most complete exposure of the chlo- 
rophyll to the sunbeams. Every feature 
of the plant is explicable on similar prin- 
ciples. It is the result of a continuous 
adjustment of relations within the plant to 
relations existing outside of it. It is im- 
portant that we should form a clear concep- 
tion of this, and a contrasted instance will 
help us. Take one of those storm-glasses 
in which the approach of atmospheric dis- 
turbance sets up a feathery crystallization 
that changes in shape and distribution as 
the state of the air outside changes. Here 
is something that simulates vegetable life, 
but there is a profound difference. In 
every one of these changes the liquid in 



i8o Reality of Religion 

the storm-glass is passive ; it is changed and 
waits until it is changed again. But in the 
case of a tree, when the increased supply 
of solar radiance in spring causes those in- 
ternal motions which result in the putting 
forth of leaves, it is quite another affair. 
Here the external change sets up an in- 
ternal change which leads to a second in- 
ternal change that anticipates a second 
external change. It is this active response 
that is the mark of life. 

All life upon the globe, whether physical 
or psychical, represents the continuous ad- 
justment of inner to outer relations. The 
degree of life is low or high, according as 
the correspondence between internal and 
external relations is simple or complex, 
limited or extensive, partial or complete, 
perfect or imperfect. The relations estab- 
lished within a plant answer only to the 
presence or absence of a certain quantity 
of light and heat, and to sundry chemical 
and physical relations in atmosphere and 
soil. In a polyp, besides general relations 



Reality of Religion i8i 

similar to these, certain more special rela- 
tions are established in correspondence 
with the eternal existence of mechanical 
irritants ; as when its tentacles contract on 
being touched. The increase of extension 
acquired by the correspondences as we 
ascend the animal scale may be seen by 
contrasting the polyp, which can simply 
distinguish between soluble and insoluble 
matter, or between opacity and translu- 
cence in its environment, with the keen- 
scented bloodhound and the far-sighted 
vulture. And the increase of complexity 
may be appreciated by comparing the mo- 
tions respectively gone through by the 
polyp on the one hand, and by the dog and 
vulture on the other, while securing and 
disposing of their prey. The more specific 
and accurate, the more complex and exten- 
sive, is the response to environing relations, 
the higher and richer, we say, is the life. 



IX 




How the Evolution of Senses expands the 
World 

|]HE whole progression of life upon 
the globe, in so far as it has been 
achieved through natural selection, 
has consisted in the preservation and the 
propagation of those living creatures in 
whom the adjustment of inner relations to 
outer relations is most successful. This is 
only a more detailed and descriptive way of 
saying that natural selection is equivalent 
to survival of the fittest. The shapes of 
animals, as well as their capacities, have 
been evolved through almost infinitely slow 
increments of adjustment upon adjustment. 
In this way, for instance, has been evolved 
the vertebrate skeleton, through a process 
of which Spencer's wonderful analysis is 
as thrilling as a poem. Or consider the 



Reality of Religion i8j 

development of the special organs of sense. 
Among the most startling disclosures of 
embryology are those which relate to this 
subject. The most perfect organs of touch 
are the vibrissce or whiskers of the cat, 
which act as long levers in communicating 
impulses to the nerve-fibres that terminate 
in clusters about the dermal sacs in which 
they are inserted. These cat-whiskers are 
merely specialized forms of such hairs as 
those which cover the bodies of most mam- 
mals, and which remain in evanescent shape 
upon the human skin imbedded in minute 
sacs. Now in their origin the eye and ear 
are identical with vibrissce. In the early 
stages of vertebrate life, while the differen- 
tiations of dermal tissue went mostly to 
the production of hairs or feathers or 
scales, sundry special differentiations went 
to the production of ears and eyes. Em- 
bryology shows that in mammals the bulb 
of the eye and the auditory chamber are ex- 
tremely metamorphosed hair-sacs, the crys- 
talline lens is a differentiated hair, and the 



184 Reality of Religion 

aqueous and vitreous humours are liquefied 
dermal tissue ! The implication of these 
wonderful facts is that sight and hearing 
were slowly differentiated from the sense 
of touch. One can seem to discern how in 
the history of the eye there was at first a 
concentration of pigment grains in a par- 
ticular dermal sac, making that spot excep- 
tionally sensitive to light; then came by 
slow degrees the heightened translucence, 
the convexity of surface, the refracting 
humours, and the multiplication of nerve- 
vesicles arranging themselves as retinal 
rods. And what was the result of all this 
for the creature in whom organs of vision 
were thus developed } There was an im- 
mense extension of the range, complexity, 
and definiteness of the adjustment of inner 
relations to outer relations ; in other words, 
there was an immense increase of life. 
There came into existence, moreover, for 
those with eyes to see it, a mighty visible 
world that for sightless creatures had been 
virtually non-existent. 



Reality of Religion i8^ 

With the further progress of organic life, 
the high development of the senses was 
attended or followed by increase of brain 
development and the correlative intelli- 
gence, immeasurably enlarging the scope 
of the correspondences between the living 
creature and the outer world. In the case 
of Man, the adjustments by which we meet 
the exigencies of life from day to day are 
largely psychical, achieved by the aid of 
ideal representations of environing circum- 
stances. Our actions are guided by our 
theory of the situation, and it needs no 
illustration to show us that a true theory is 
an adjustment of one's ideas to the external 
facts, and that such adjustments are helps 
to successful living. The whole worth of 
education is directed toward cultivating the 
capacity of framing associations of ideas 
that conform to objective facts. It is thus 
that life is guided. 



X 




Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting 
Reality of Religion 

O as we look back over the marvel- 
lous life-history of our planet, even 
from the dull time when there was 
no life more exalted than that of conferva 
scum on the surface of a pool, through 
ages innumerable until the present time 
when Man is learning how to decipher Na- 
ture's secrets, we look back over an infi- 
nitely slow series of minute adjustments, 
gradually and laboriously increasing the 
points of contact between the inner Life 
and the World environing. Step by step 
in the upward advance toward Humanity 
the environment has enlarged. The world 
of the fresh-water alga was its tiny pool 
during its brief term of existence ; the 
world of civilized man comprehends the 



Reality of Religion i8y 

stellar universe during countless aeons of 
time. Every stage of enlargement has had 
reference to actual existences outside. The 
eye was developed in response to the out- 
ward existence of radiant light, the ear in 
response tci the outward existence of acous- 
tic vibrations, the mother's love came in 
response to the infant's needs, fidelity and 
honour were slowly developed as the nas- 
cent social life required them ; everywhere 
the internal adjustment has been brought 
about so as to harmonize with some actually 
existing external fact. Such has been Na- 
ture's method, such is the deepest law of 
life that science has been able to detect. 

Now there was a critical moment in the 
history of our planet, when love was begin- 
ning to play a part hitherto unknown, when 
notions of right and wrong were germinat- 
ing in the nascent Human Soul, when the 
family was coming into existence, when 
social ties were beginning to be knit, when 
winged words first took their flight through 
the air. It was the moment when the pro- 



J 88 Reality of Religion 

cess of evolution was being shifted to a 
higher plane, when civilization was to be 
superadded to organic evolution, when the 
last and highest of creatures was coming 
upon the scene, when the dramatic purpose 
of creation was approaching fulfilment. 
At that critical moment we see the nascent 
Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward 
something akin to itself not in the realm 
of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal 
Presence beyond. An internal adjustment 
of ideas was achieved in correspondence 
with an Unseen World. That the ideas 
were very crude and childlike, that they 
were put together with all manner of gro- 
tesqueness, is what might be expected. 
The cardinal fact is that the crude child- 
like mind was groping to put itself into 
relation with an ethical world not visible to 
the senses. And one aspect of this fact, 
not to be lightly passed over, is the fact 
that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene 
coeval with the birth of Humanity, has 
played such a dominant part in the subse- 



Reality of Religion i8g 

quent evolution of human society that what 
history would be without it is quite beyond 
imagination. As to the dimensions of this 
cardinal fact there can thus be no question. 
None can deny that it is the largest and 
most ubiquitous fact connected with the 
existence of mankind upon the earth. 

Now if the relation thus established in 
the morning twilight of Man's existence 
between the Human Soul and a world in- 
visible and immaterial is a relation of which 
only the subjective term is real and the ob- 
jective term is non-existent, then, I say, it 
is something utterly without precedent in 
the whole history of creation. All the ana- 
logies of Evolution, so far as we have yet 
been able to decipher it, are overwhelming 
against any such supposition. To suppose 
that during countless ages, from the sea- 
weed up to Man, the progress of life was 
achieved through adjustments to external 
realities, but that then the method was all 
at once changed and throughout a vast 
province of evolution the end was secured 



ipo Reality of Religion 

through adjustments to external non-reali- 
ties, is to do sheer violence to logic and to 
common sense. Or, to vary the form of 
statement, since every adjustment whereby 
any creature sustains life may be called a 
true step, and every maladjustment whereby 
life is wrecked may be called a false step ; 
if we are asked to believe that Nature, after 
having throughout the whole round of her 
inferior products achieved results through 
the accumulation of all true steps and piti- 
less rejection of all false steps, suddenly 
changed her method and in the case of 
her highest product began achieving results 
through the accumulation of false steps ; I 
say we are entitled to resent such a sug- 
gestion as an insult to our understandings. 
All the analogies of Nature fairly -shout 
against the assumption of such a breach of 
continuity between the evolution of Man 
and all previous evolution. So far as our 
knowledge of Nature goes the whole mo- 
mentum of it carries us onward to the 
conclusion that the Unseen World, as the 



Reality of Religion igi 

objective term in a relation of fundamental 
importance that has coexisted with the 
whole career of Mankind, has a real exist- 
ence ; and it is but following out the ana- 
logy to regard that Unseen World as the 
theatre where the ethical process is destined 
to reach its full consummation. The les- 
son of evolution is that through all these 
weary ages the Human Soul has not been 
cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, 
but in spite of seemingly endless groping 
and stumbling it has been rising to the 
recognition of its essential kinship with the 
ever-living God. Of all the implications 
of the doctrine of evolution with regard to 
Man, I believe the very deepest and strong- 
est to be that which asserts the Everlasting 
Reajity of Religion. 

So far as I am aware, the foregoing argu- 
ment is here advanced for the first time. It 
does not pretend to meet the requirements 
of scientific demonstration. One must not 
look for scientific demonstration in pro- 
blems that contain so many factors tran- 



ig2 Reality of Religion 

scending our direct experience. But as an 
appeal to our common sense, the argument 
here brought forward surely has tremen- 
dous weight. It seems to me far more 
convincing than any chain of subtle meta- 
physical reasoning can ever be ; for such 
chains, however, invincible in appearance, 
are no stronger than the weakest of their 
links, and in metaphysics one is always un- 
easily suspecting some undetected flaw. 
My argument represents the impression 
that is irresistibly forced upon one by a 
broad general familiarity with Nature's pro- 
cesses and methods ; it therefore belongs 
to the class of arguments that survive. 

Observe, too, that it is far from being a 
modified repetition of the old argument 
that beliefs universally accepted must be 
true. Upon the view here presented, every 
specific opinion ever entertained by man 
respecting religious things may be wrong, 
and in all probability is exceedingly crude, 
and yet the Everlasting Reality of Reli- 
gion, in its three indispensable elements as 



Reality of Religion 193 

here set forth, remains unassailable. Our 
common-sense argument puts the scientific 
presumption entirely and decisively on the 
side of religion and against all atheistic and 
materialistic explanations of the universe. 
It establishes harmony between our highest 
knowledge and our highest aspirations by 
showing that the latter no less than the 
former are a normal result of the universal 
cosmic process. It has nothing to fear 
from the advance of scientific discovery, for 
as these things come to be better under- 
stood, it is going to be realized that the 
days of the antagonism between Science 
and Religion must by and by come to an 
end. That antagonism has been chiefly 
due to the fact that religious ideas were 
until lately allied with the doctrine of spe- 
cial creations. They have therefore needed 
to be remodelled and considered from new 
points of view. But we have at length 
reached a stage where it is becoming daily 
more and more apparent that with the 
deeper study of Nature the old strife be- 



194 Reality of Religion 

tween faith and knowledge is drawing to a 
close ; and disentangled at last from that 
ancient slough of despond the Human 
Mind will breathe a freer air and enjoy a 
vastly extended horizon. 



L^ENVOI 



Yesterday, when weary with writing, and my mind quite 
dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and 
a salad I had asked for was set before me. " It seems, then," 
said I aloud, " that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of 
salt, drops of vinegar and oil, and sUces of eggs, had been float- 
ing about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen 
by chance that there would come a salad." *' Yes," says my 
wife, " but not so nice and well-dressed as this of mine is ! " — 
Kepler, apud Tait and Stewart, Paradoxical Philosophy, 



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